Health care, tech industries dominate Glassdoor's ranking of highest-paying jobs

Tech and health care industries dominated Glassdoor's annual breakdown of the highest-paying jobs and companies in the U.S. in 2019.

The top four highest-paying jobs on the list are all related to health care. While health care professionals earn the most according to the career website's top 25 highest-paying jobs, a majority of those high salaries were in the tech field.

The top five paying jobs based on median base salary according to Glassdoor's data are: Physician, pharmacy manager, dentist, pharmacist and enterprise architect. Next on the list are corporate counsel, software engineering manager, physician assistant, corporate controller and software development manager. Those annual salaries ranged from $193,415 to $122,585.

"Tech and health care roles continue to dominate, which isn’t a huge surprise, it's something we’ve seen in the past, but it is really intriguing to see that the four top paying roles are all in health care," Amanda Stansell, a senior economic research analyst at Glassdoor who led the study told ABC News.

"All of these roles require advanced education, so it's showing that these high-paying roles continue to be tied to in-demand skills and higher education," Stansell said.

While this ranking of the highest-paying jobs may not come as a big surprise to many, there were some unexpected contenders on the list of highest-paying companies for 2019.

Tech giants including Twitter, Google, Facebook and Microsoft were included as some of the highest-paying companies previously, proving the tech industry shows no signs of slowing down.

Some interesting trends this year included higher emphasis on and compensation for cybersecurity, according to Stansell, who noted that "information security engineer" is a title that "wasn't on our list last year."

"We’ve been hearing about companies having very high profile breaches and attacks," said Stansell. "Companies are definitely taking notice and willing to pay competitive salaries to get these people on board and help them protect their company's data," Stansell said.

Palo Alto Networks, a cybersecurity firm headquartered in Santa Clara, California, quietly topped this year's list of highest-paying companies with a median total salary of $170,929.

"Palo Alto Network is a security company that helps thousands of organizations prevent cyberbreaches," Stansell said. "I think one of the reasons that they rose to the top of the list this year is that they need to offer very competitive salaries to hire the best talent possible," she said.

"While they aren't a name you hear everyday on the news cycle like Google and Facebook, they have thousands of employees worldwide," she added.

Outside of the tech and health care spheres, a few consulting companies made appearances on the list as well as a few "biotech" companies, according to Stansell.

Going forward, Stansell said she doesn't predict health care and tech to be dethroned anytime soon.

"We continue, again and again, to see tech and health care roles rise to the top when we look at highest-paying jobs," she said. "For highest-paying companies we continue to see tech rise to the top."

Another pattern that emerged from this year's list was that a majority of the highest-paying companies were headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, but Stansell said most of them have offices and jobs all over the U.S. and they looked at base salaries nationally.