The potential for a decent salary is a key part of anyone’s work goals. After all, even if you’re trying to pursue something you really enjoy, you need to be able to carve out a good life for yourself doing it.
With remote work currently booming and seemingly sticking around for the foreseeable future, many of you are asking just how much you can make as a remote worker. Is it possible to hit six figures working from anywhere with a WiFi connection?
Well, it is. In fact, the sky is the limit with remote work. What you should really be asking yourself is if you can make the decisions necessary to leverage remote work in your favor and earn a high salary.
A remote work worker in the United States can make anywhere between $30,000 to $150,000 annually, depending on the type of remote work, company location, and the remote worker’s level of experience.
Here are some quick details that might interest you.
The Average Salary Of A Remote Worker In The US
When accounting for all industries and positions, the median pay for a remote worker is just slightly over $60,000 per year. That can sound incredibly low if you live in a major city, or it can sound like a great middle-class job in a low-cost-of-living area.
However, this is not the maximum or minimum amount you can earn.
The higher paying traditional positions, such as nursing assistants, speech and language pathologists, developers, and similar trained positions make roughly $80,000 per year when working remotely.
Workers who work remotely via gig work and freelancing work can make wildly varying pay grades ranging from as low as $10,000 per year to six-figure salaries.
This largely has to do with the worker’s decision-making skills regarding their business, the amount of work they put into it, and various other factors such as what they’re doing and whether or not they’re expanding with the tools available to them.
Working remotely for a traditional business is far more predictable.
Do Remote Workers Get Paid More Than In-Office Workers?
While this is a complex question to answer, on average, remote workers have been paid more than workers who work from the office. However, that is slowly changing with some companies.
One of the ways remote workers earn “more” is because they can work for high-paying companies while living in areas with lower costs of living.
For example, if someone held an IT position for a major company in Silicon Valley from their Iowa residence, they would make considerably more than their neighbors who work at local businesses.
Remote workers also earn more by being able to take on other jobs without sacrificing their primary job.
Someone who works as a remote developer for a company can easily pursue their writing or photography career on the side for extra income, and because they can get their work done faster, they can do so while maintaining a good work-life balance.
Unfortunately, some employers are accounting for this and creating “location policies”. These policies allow the company to adjust pay according to the localized cost of living for their employees.
Meaning that the Iowa employee we used as an example earlier would make less for the same job as someone who did it from California.
Luckily, some companies aren’t adopting these policies as a way to retain talented workers and reward their skills and productivity.
What Is The Highest Paid Remote Work In The United States?
Finally, if you’re looking for the ideal remote work field to earn a great living in a financial sense, we recommend the tech field.
Right now, cloud architecture developers are making as much as $160k per year working from home.
Experienced webmasters and similar tech jobs also make around the same figure while enjoying the benefits of taking on side hustles that generate additional profits. Overall, the remote tech field is booming.
