If you’re looking for a company that pays its employees exceedingly well, you’d best start looking at job ads for consulting or tech. Those are the two sectors that dominated Glassdoor’s annual list of the 25 Highest Paying Companies in America.
A.T. Kearney topped 2016’s rankings. The Chicago-based management consulting firm offers employees annual median total compensation of $167,534. At No. 5 on Glassdoor’s list, Google (GOOGL) led the tech sector with median total compensation of $153,750. The only company in the top 25 that wasn’t related to consulting or tech was credit card issuer Visa (V) at No. 11 with median total compensation of $150,000.
As in previous years, Glassdoor’s list is collated from anonymous salary reports from staff members working in around 540,000 different companies.
The median base salary of the 25 companies on this list comes out to around $130,000 and is about four-and-a-half times more than the median net compensation of around $28,851 for the average American. The reason for the disparity, as Glassdoor notes, is the in-demand skills that these companies are seeking, and the salary expectations that workers often command from these companies in return.
“Salaries are sky-high at consulting companies due to ‘barriers of entry’ in this field, which refers to employers wanting top consultants to have personal contacts, reputations, and specialized skills and knowledge,” Dr. Andrew Chamberlain, Glassdoor’s chief economist, said in a prepared statement.
“In technology, we continue to see unprecedented salaries as the war for talent is still very active, largely due to the ongoing shortage of highly skilled workers needed.”
In a previous list of highest paying jobs, Glassdoor affirmed that many of the best-compensated roles were found in the tech sector. However, these companies are also a tough door to enter: Many of its highest-paying companies also show up in Glassdoor’s list of toughest companies to interview at.
For those who do get in, it’s not all work and no play: Some companies, such as Boston Consulting Group, Alphabet (GOOG) and VMware (VMW), have also been regulars on Coins2Day’s annual Best Companies to Work For list.