Top 100 College Majors, Ranked for 2026

We ranked the top college majors for 2026 using 1.17 million real resumes. The most interesting thing isn’t the ranking. It’s the trend underneath it.

Every dot is a major. Hover or tap any one to see its popularity, pay, and trend. Drag-friendly on mobile.

---

Every year, people ask us the same question: which college major actually pays off? And every year there’s a fresh round of takes about it, most of them based on surveys of a few thousand graduates who were asked to remember what they studied.

We do it differently. We read the resumes. This year we pulled 1.17 million of them, took the major off each one, and counted. Same method we have used for years, which means we can do something a survey can’t: watch the same population shift, year by year.

And one shift jumps off the page.

The Computer Science boom, and the plateau nobody saw coming

The share of resumes listing Computer Science as a major nearly tripled in three years: from 3.9% in 2020 to 11.4% in 2023. Every “learn to code” headline of the late 2010s, every bootcamp, every parent nudging a teenager toward a CS degree shows up right here, in the slope of that line.

And then it stopped. 2024 came in at 11.2%, dead flat against 2023. The boom didn’t reverse, but it ran out of road exactly as the “AI is coming for programmers” anxiety hit its peak. People didn’t flee Computer Science. They just stopped piling in.

That’s the story worth telling, and it’s the kind of thing you only see when you have the raw data instead of a one-time survey.

The 2026 college majors ranking

Boom or not, Computer Science still sits comfortably at #1. Here’s the full picture for the most popular majors this year.

The top three are steady: Computer Science, Business Administration, Mechanical Engineering, same as they have been for years. The movement is underneath, and it lines up with what’s happening to degrees nationally. A few things stand out:

• Computing is still rising. Computer Science, Information Technology, and Computer Engineering all moved up, the same direction as the national numbers, where computing degrees have grown faster than any other field for a decade.
• Health and life sciences are climbing. Biology, Nursing, and Psychology all gained, echoing the steady national rise in health-profession and biological-science degrees.
• Business is flat, not falling. The big business majors barely moved, which matches the national picture: business is still the largest field by a mile, but it stopped growing.
• Information Technology is the quiet earner. It barely cracks the top five on popularity, but it maps to the highest-paying career track on the board.

Curious how much has changed? You can compare this against our Top 100 College Majors in 2019 historical ranking, the same analysis run seven years ago, to see which majors held and which ones moved.

The full top 100 college majors

You came here to find your major, so here are all 100. Popularity is the major’s slice of the 1.17 million we counted. Salary is the median wage for the career that major most commonly leads to, from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The trend arrow blends the direction in our own data with the national degree numbers from the Department of Education, so it reflects whether a field is genuinely growing or cooling, not just one year of noise.

#	Trend	Major	Popularity	Median Salary
1	▲9	Computer Science	1.34%	$133K
2	▲1	Business Administration	1.01%	$101K
3	▼1	Mechanical Engineering	0.65%	$99K
4	-	Engineering	0.4%	$91K
5	▼1	Accounting	0.4%	$81K
6	▲10	Information Technology	0.32%	$171K
7	▼1	Electrical Engineering	0.28%	$109K
8	▲1	Economics	0.25%	$115K
9	-	Business	0.25%	$101K
10	▲1	Finance	0.21%	$101K
11	-	Management	0.21%	$101K
12	▲5	Biology	0.21%	$91K
13	▼1	Civil Engineering	0.19%	$99K
14	-	Business Management	0.17%	$101K
15	▲10	Computer Engineering	0.17%	$156K
16	▼2	Communications	0.16%	$69K
17	▲3	Psychology	0.15%	$94K
18	▲10	Software Engineering	0.12%	$133K
19	-	Chemical Engineering	0.12%	$117K
20	-	English	0.12%	$75K
21	-	Mathematics	0.11%	$99K
22	▲9	Information Systems	0.1%	$171K
23	▼4	Chemistry	0.1%	$86K
24	-	Industrial Engineering	0.1%	$99K
25	-	Project Management	0.08%	$100K
26	▲3	Education	0.08%	$84K
27	-	Commerce	0.08%	$101K
28	-	Political Science	0.08%	$132K
29	▲4	Nursing	0.08%	$93K
30	-	Electronics	0.08%	$109K
31	▼4	Applied Science	0.08%	$157K
32	-	Human Resources	0.06%	$72K
33	-	Business Analytics	0.06%	$99K
34	▲10	Data Science	0.06%	$112K
35	-	Sociology	0.06%	$101K
36	▼4	Physics	0.06%	$155K
37	-	Criminal Justice	0.05%	$74K
38	▲9	Computer Applications	0.05%	$133K
39	-	Statistics	0.05%	$104K
40	-	Data Analytics	0.05%	$112K
41	-	History	0.05%	$72K
42	-	Engineering Management	0.04%	$165K
43	▲9	Computer Information Systems	0.03%	$171K
44	-	International Business	0.03%	$101K
45	▲3	Public Health	0.03%	$117K
46	-	Administration	0.03%	$101K
47	-	Aerospace Engineering	0.03%	$134K
48	-	Systems Engineering Management	0.03%	$165K
49	▲9	Management Information Systems	0.03%	$171K
50	-	Graphic Design	0.03%	$61K
51	▲9	Information System	0.03%	$171K
52	▲4	Biochemistry	0.02%	$107K
53	-	Electronic Engineering	0.02%	$109K
54	▼2	Journalism	0.02%	$57K
55	-	Law	0.02%	$151K
56	-	Petroleum Engineering	0.02%	$135K
57	-	Biomedical Engineering	0.02%	$106K
58	-	International Relations	0.02%	$132K
59	▲9	Cybersecurity	0.02%	$124K
60	-	Public Administration	0.02%	$106K
61	-	Social Work	0.02%	$58K
62	-	Information Management	0.02%	$171K
63	▼4	Geology	0.02%	$92K
64	-	Architecture	0.02%	$93K
65	▼2	Public Relations	0.02%	$69K
66	-	Mechatronics	0.02%	$99K
67	-	Systems Engineering	0.02%	$99K
68	-	Geography	0.02%	$90K
69	-	Materials Engineering	0.02%	$104K
70	▲4	Biotechnology	0.02%	$51K
71	-	Agriculture	0.02%	$82K
72	-	Electrical Power Engineering	0.02%	$109K
73	-	Philosophy	0.02%	$84K
74	▲9	Artificial Intelligence	0.02%	$112K
75	▼2	Advertising	0.02%	$141K
76	▼4	Information Science	0.02%	$171K
77	▲4	Zoology	0.02%	$70K
78	▲4	Microbiology	0.01%	$85K
79	-	Healthcare Administration	0.01%	$117K
80	▼4	Environmental Science	0.01%	$78K
81	-	Paralegal Studies	0.01%	$60K
82	-	Hospitality Management	0.01%	$65K
83	-	Banking	0.01%	$161K
84	-	Operations Management	0.01%	$101K
85	-	Religious Studies	0.01%	$58K
86	-	Organizational Leadership	0.01%	$101K
87	▼2	Telecommunications	0.01%	$82K
88	-	Anthropology	0.01%	$63K
89	▲3	Early Childhood Education	0.01%	$37K
90	▲3	Teaching	0.01%	$63K
91	-	Applied Mathematics	0.01%	$99K
92	▲3	Pharmacy	0.01%	$136K
93	-	International Studies	0.01%	$132K
94	-	Logistics	0.01%	$79K
95	-	Interior Design	0.01%	$62K
96	-	Facilities Engineering	0.01%	$99K
97	-	Construction Management	0.01%	$104K
98	-	Art	0.01%	$53K
99	-	Business Studies	0.01%	$101K
100	-	Interdisciplinary Studies	0.01%	$84K

Popularity versus pay

The ranking tells you what’s popular. This tells you the trade. Computer Science sits in the rare spot that’s both crowded and well paid. Information Technology and Computer Engineering are less common but pay the most. Accounting and Civil Engineering are popular but cluster lower on the pay scale. There’s no free lunch, but some lunches clearly beat others.

How we did it, and where we might be wrong

The popularity numbers are ours: 1.17 million US resumes, with anything marked private at upload left out. The salary figures come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, matched to the career each major most often leads to, because honest salary data needs a bigger, cleaner sample than self-reported numbers can give.

A few honest caveats:

• We only see people on the job market, so we undercount majors whose graduates often don’t job-hunt the usual way.
• Our users skew toward strong schools, which can tilt the picture.
• Major labels are messy. People write “CS,” “Comp Sci,” and “Computer Science,” and we fold the obvious cases together, but the long tail is noisier than the top.
• A salary tied to a major is really a salary tied to a typical career path. Plenty of English majors out-earn plenty of engineers.

If you want to check our work or argue with it, the data and the code are public: github.com/rezscore/top-majors-2026.

---

Your major is not your resume

Here’s what 1.17 million resumes make obvious: your major matters a lot less than what you did with it. We rank majors because you asked, and because it’s fun, but the resumes that win interviews aren’t the ones with the “right” major. They’re the ones that turn whatever you studied into evidence of impact.

That’s the part we can help with.

Grade your resume free

Upload it, and in about ten seconds we’ll show you where it’s strong, where it’s vague, and what a recruiter sees first. Computer Science or Comparative Literature, the resume is what gets read.

---

Popularity from 1.17 million resumes uploaded to RezScore (US, privacy opt-outs removed). Salary from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2024. Run the analysis yourself: github.com/rezscore/top-majors-2026.