How much are we all paid? More than you think! This chart shows how much we earn in benefits as a percentage of our cash wages. These are the ten major occupational groupings defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

The BLS provides average annual earnings for a wide variety of jobs here. All we have to do is add in the benefits based on which occupational group each job belongs to. This gives us a pretty close estimate of the total compensation for each job:

You’ll occasionally be surprised by someone claiming that, say, the average teacher makes more than $90,000. But this true only if you’re talking about total compensation, which includes Social Security payments, health coverage, retirement contributions, vacation time, and so forth. There’s nothing wrong with talking about total comp, but only if you also provide some clear context for comparison. The average middle-school teacher does indeed earn $90,000 all-in—which sounds surprisingly high until you realize that by the same metric, programmers earn $150,000, registered nurses earn $115,000, loan officers earn $110,000, and plumbers earn $87,000. Most people don’t know that unless you point it out.

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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