Average IQ by Profession: Which Jobs Rank Highest?

Where these numbers come from

Almost every "IQ by job" chart online traces back to one of two sources.

The first is Harrell & Harrell (1945), who tested roughly 18,000 U.S. Army Air Force enlisted men and sorted them by the civilian job they held before enlisting. Their scores were later expressed as IQ-equivalents. It remains the single most-cited table for this topic — but it is a wartime, male-only, U.S. sample from over 80 years ago, and the authors themselves warned that professional averages might be understated because many of the strongest candidates had already been pulled out to become officers.

The second is Hauser (2002), "Meritocracy, Cognitive Ability, and the Sources of Occupational Success," which followed Wisconsin high-school graduates and their siblings for decades and linked their cognitive scores to the jobs they eventually held. Modern employment tests like the Wonderlic Personnel Test add a third strand: an average score of about 20–21 maps to roughly IQ 100, and typical professional roles cluster in the 25+ range.

The pattern across all of them is the same. Jobs that select hard for years of schooling and credentialing — medicine, law, academia, engineering — show higher average scores. That is largely a selection effect: you cannot become a physician without clearing a long series of academic filters, each of which correlates with cognitive test performance. The job does not make people smarter; it screens for a trait that also happens to move the average.

The overlap is bigger than the gap

This is the part most rankings quietly skip, and it is the most important point on this page.

Within a single occupation, the range of scores is enormous — far larger than the difference between one occupation's average and another's. Harrell & Harrell noted this directly: the highest scorers in a "low-IQ" trade comfortably outscored the lowest scorers in a "high-IQ" profession. Picture two overlapping bell curves that are nudged a little apart. The peaks differ, but the bulk of the two curves sits on top of each other.

What that means in plain terms: knowing someone is an accountant rather than a mechanic shifts your best guess about their score upward by a few points. It does not tell you they are smarter than any particular mechanic. Plenty of electricians, drivers and salespeople score above the average professor, and plenty of people in high-scoring fields sit near the population midpoint.

IQ is only a partial predictor of a career

It is tempting to read a table like this and conclude that cognitive ability decides your career. It does not — it is one input among many.

The best evidence here is Schmidt & Hunter's (1998) meta-analysis of 85 years of personnel-selection research. They found that general mental ability was the single most useful predictor of job performance, with an operational validity of about r = .51 across all jobs, rising to r = .58 for the most complex roles. That is a genuinely strong result for a single measure — but a correlation of .51 still leaves the majority of the variation in performance unexplained. Later work by Sackett and colleagues (2022) argued the true figure is lower still, closer to r = .31 under stricter statistical corrections.

Everything else — conscientiousness, motivation, communication, opportunity, health, family circumstances, sheer persistence — fills the large remaining gap. As of 2026, no serious researcher treats an IQ score as a verdict on what job someone can do or how well they will do it. It is a modest, useful signal, not a ceiling.

If you are curious where you personally land, the only honest way to find out is to actually measure it rather than infer it from a job title. Our test is free to take, with a detailed score report available afterward — no subscription, no auto-renewal, just a one-time report if you want the full breakdown.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Which profession has the highest average IQ?

A: Physicians, professors and lawyers tend to top the rankings, with estimated averages around 125–132. In Hauser's (2002) data, physicians and professor-researchers sit at the very top; in the older Harrell & Harrell (1945) figures, accountants and lawyers reach about 128. The exact leader depends on which dataset you use, and the differences at the top are small.

Q: What is the average IQ for most jobs?

A: By definition, most jobs cluster around the population average of 100. Cognitive tests are scaled so that 100 is the mean with a standard deviation of 15. Mid-skill and manual roles typically fall in the 95–110 band, while highly credentialed professions pull the average up into the 120s.

Q: Does a high-IQ job mean everyone in it is highly intelligent?

A: No — the overlap between professions is larger than the gap between their averages. A group average is a statistical tendency, not a description of any individual. Many people in lower-scoring occupations outscore the average person in a "high-IQ" field, and vice versa.

Q: Can my IQ predict which career I should choose?

A: Only weakly. General mental ability predicts job performance with a validity of roughly r = .51 (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998), or lower by more conservative estimates — meaningful, but far from decisive. Interests, work ethic, opportunity and skills matter at least as much.

References

• Harrell, T. W., & Harrell, M. S. (1945). Army General Classification Test Scores for Civilian Occupations. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 5(3), 229–239.
• Hauser, R. M. (2002). Meritocracy, Cognitive Ability, and the Sources of Occupational Success. Center for Demography and Ecology, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
• Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. E. (1998). The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology. Psychological Bulletin, 124(2), 262–274.
• Sackett, P. R., et al. (2022). Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(11).

Last updated: July 13, 2026