Top 100 Undergraduate Majors 2026

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

---

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. (A note on the chart: 2020, 2025, and 2026 are drawn dashed because we have thinner data for those years, so read the solid stretch, 2021 to 2024, as the reliable trend.)

The 2026 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 immovable: Computer Science, Business Administration, Mechanical Engineering, same as they have been for years. Below them, the deck reshuffled. A few things stand out:

• Biology climbed hard, roughly 20 spots into the top 10. A wave of pre-med and health-sciences students, the long tail of the pandemic, shows up clearly.
• The broad labels won. Plain “Engineering” and “Business” gained ground while their specialized cousins (Industrial Engineering, Computer Engineering, Finance) slipped. Students are hedging toward flexible degrees.
• Information Technology is the quiet earner. It barely cracks the top 5 on popularity, but it maps to the highest-paying career track on the board.

The full top 100

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 last column is how the major moved in our rankings since last year.

#	vs 2025	Major	Popularity	Median Salary
1	-	Computer Science	1.34%	$133K
2	▲1	Business Administration	1.01%	$101K
3	▲4	Mechanical Engineering	0.65%	$99K
4	▲15	Engineering	0.4%	$91K
5	▲7	Accounting	0.4%	$81K
6	▼1	Information Technology	0.32%	$171K
7	▲2	Electrical Engineering	0.28%	$109K
8	▲2	Economics	0.25%	$115K
9	▼7	Business	0.25%	$101K
10	▲3	Finance	0.21%	$101K
11	▼7	Management	0.21%	$101K
12	-	Biology	0.21%	$91K
13	▲15	Civil Engineering	0.19%	$99K
14	-	Business Management	0.17%	$101K
15	▼1	Computer Engineering	0.17%	$156K
16	▲6	Communications	0.16%	$69K
17	▲9	Psychology	0.15%	$94K
18	▼7	Chemical Engineering	0.12%	$117K
19	▼1	English	0.12%	$75K
20	-	Software Engineering	0.11%	$133K
21	▲11	Mathematics	0.11%	$99K
22	-	Information Systems	0.1%	$171K
23	▼6	Chemistry	0.1%	$86K
24	▲10	Industrial Engineering	0.1%	$99K
25	-	Project Management	0.08%	$100K
26	▲11	Education	0.08%	$84K
27	-	Commerce	0.08%	$101K
28	▲3	Political Science	0.08%	$132K
29	▼14	Nursing	0.08%	$93K
30	-	Electronics	0.08%	$109K
31	-	Applied Science	0.08%	$157K
32	-	Business Analytics	0.06%	$99K
33	-	Data Science	0.06%	$112K
34	-	Sociology	0.06%	$101K
35	-	Physics	0.06%	$155K
36	-	Criminal Justice	0.05%	$74K
37	-	Computer Applications	0.05%	$133K
38	-	Statistics	0.05%	$104K
39	-	Data Analytics	0.05%	$112K
40	-	History	0.05%	$72K
41	-	Engineering Management	0.04%	$165K
42	▼3	Human Resources	0.04%	$72K
43	-	Computer Information Systems	0.03%	$171K
44	-	International Business	0.03%	$101K
45	-	Administration	0.03%	$101K
46	-	Aerospace Engineering	0.03%	$134K
47	-	Systems Engineering Management	0.03%	$165K
48	-	Management Information Systems	0.03%	$171K
49	-	Graphic Design	0.03%	$61K
50	-	Information System	0.03%	$171K
51	-	Biochemistry	0.02%	$107K
52	-	Electronic Engineering	0.02%	$109K
53	-	Journalism	0.02%	$57K
54	-	Law	0.02%	$151K
55	-	Petroleum Engineering	0.02%	$135K
56	-	Biomedical Engineering	0.02%	$106K
57	-	International Relations	0.02%	$132K
58	-	Public Administration	0.02%	$106K
59	-	Social Work	0.02%	$58K
60	-	Information Management	0.02%	$171K
61	-	Geology	0.02%	$92K
62	-	Public Health	0.02%	$117K
63	-	Architecture	0.02%	$93K
64	-	Public Relations	0.02%	$69K
65	-	Mechatronics	0.02%	$99K
66	-	Systems Engineering	0.02%	$99K
67	-	Geography	0.02%	$90K
68	-	Materials Engineering	0.02%	$104K
69	-	Biotechnology	0.02%	$51K
70	-	Electrical Power Engineering	0.02%	$109K
71	-	Philosophy	0.02%	$84K
72	-	Human Resource Management	0.02%	$140K
73	-	Artificial Intelligence	0.02%	$112K
74	-	Advertising	0.02%	$141K
75	-	Business Studies Applied Science	0.02%	$101K
76	-	Information Science	0.02%	$171K
77	-	Zoology	0.02%	$70K
78	-	Microbiology	0.01%	$85K
79	-	Healthcare Administration	0.01%	$117K
80	-	Environmental Science	0.01%	$78K
81	-	Paralegal Studies	0.01%	$60K
82	-	Hospitality Management	0.01%	$65K
83	-	Cybersecurity	0.01%	$124K
84	-	Banking	0.01%	$161K
85	-	Operations Management	0.01%	$101K
86	-	Management Studies	0.01%	$101K
87	-	Strategy	0.01%	$99K
88	-	Business Information Systems	0.01%	$171K
89	-	Religious Studies	0.01%	$58K
90	-	Technical Management	0.01%	$165K
91	-	Organizational Leadership	0.01%	$101K
92	-	Applied Business	0.01%	$101K
93	-	Telecommunications	0.01%	$82K
94	-	Banking And Finance	0.01%	$161K
95	-	Data Management	0.01%	$101K
96	-	Anthropology	0.01%	$63K
97	-	Early Childhood Education	0.01%	$37K
98	-	Teaching	0.01%	$63K
99	-	Applied Mathematics	0.01%	$99K
100	-	Pharmacy	0.01%	$136K

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.