Looking for the highest paying jobs in Washington? Maybe you are planning your future, or you’re thinking of a stress-free existence in Washington. You’re not the only one! Deciding on the highest paying jobs in Washington is what everybody would like to know.
I mean, who would not want a career that is fulfilling and brings home the bacon? Sure, it’s not all about that, but let’s get honest, it doesn’t harm.
So now, if you’re specifically searching for the highest paying jobs in Washington, you’ve come to the right place.
Here we’ll tell you the top 15 highest paying jobs in Washington that pay some pretty decent paychecks. We’ll then examine why they’re worth it and how you might have to qualify.
Take this as your no-nonsense, no-jargon, straight-shooting guide to the labor market. So now let us see what Washington state is offering.
Table of contents
- Top 15 Highest Paying Jobs in Washington State
- 1. Pilot
- 2. Box Truck Owner Operator
- 3. School Occupational Therapist
- 4. Criminal Defense Attorney
- 5. Real Estate Appraiser
- 6. Network Administrator
- 7. Industrial Engineering
- 8. Communications Consultant
- 9. Travel Pta
- 10. Public Health Nutritionist
- 11. Welding
- 12. Consulting Utility Forester
- 13. Laundry Attendant
- 14. Disease Intervention Specialist.
- 15. Concrete Foreman
- How Can You Prepare for These Highest Paying Jobs in Washington?
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Conclusion
- References
- Recommendations
Top 15 Highest Paying Jobs in Washington State
The state of Washington possesses plenty of highest paying jobs in Washington in many sectors. It boasts the capital city of Olympia and also the city of Seattle, which is also one of the largest technology corporation centers in the world.
If you currently live in Washington or plan on relocating there, it would be beneficial to know about the top paying positions in the region. Below is the list of the top 15 Highest Paying Jobs in Washington:
1. Pilot
Annual salary: $113,300-$175,600
The first highest paying jobs in Washington on our list is Pilot. Pilots operate airplanes, moving individuals and cargo worldwide. Their job varies, based on their discipline. They perform pre-flight checks to get the airplane flight-capable, communicate with air traffic control, and study and alter flight paths as needed.
Commercial plots notify passengers on commercial flights or transport cargo on cargo flights. Others even fly specialty flights, such as crop dusting for agriculture.
Skills Needed
1. Commercial Pilot License: Hold a commercial pilot license from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
2. Flight Experience: Have a minimum of 1,500 flight experience.
3. Aviation Regulations Knowledge: Have knowledge regarding FAA rules and regulations.
4. Good Communication: Have good communication skills to provide clear communication to air traffic controllers, passengers, and crew members.
5. Flexibility and Adaptability: Remember to be prepared for varying weather conditions, flight schedules, and any other unexpected situation.
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2. Box Truck Owner Operator
Annual salary range: $56,600-$169,900
Another highest paying jobs in Washington is Box truck owner-operator. This is a truck driver who transports and delivers cargo in a truck leased or owned by him. A box truck will be 4 to 7 meters in length and will possess a cargo space; though these vehicles are not semi-trailer trucks, they can tow other cargo.
Box truck owner-operators lease out their equipment and their services to companies for short or long haul shipments.
Skills Needed
1. Commercial Driver’s License (CDL): Obtain a CDL with no driving record.
2. Business Management Skills: Acquire skills to be qualified to run your own business, including accounting, marketing, and customer service.
3. Logistics and Transportation Knowledge: Acquire knowledge in logistics and transportation industry, including industry regulations, knowledge of routes, and delivery protocol.
4. Mechanical Aptitude: Acquire knowledge of how to do simple truck repairs and maintenance.
5. Time Management: Master time management skills to guarantee on-time pickups and deliveries.
3. School Occupational Therapist
Annual salary range: $78,700-$120,100
School occupational therapists work in schools and assist disabled kids to enable them to integrate in school life. This highest paying jobs in Washington assist pupils in learning skills and techniques in such a way so that they could perform some work or problems.
It is not only being the therapy practitioner of a school in which one would work with students, but the teachers and the parents too for being able to provide the maximum care for the pupil.
Skills Needed
1. Master’s Degree in Occupational Therapy: Get a master’s degree in occupational therapy from a known institution.
2. Occupational Therapy License: Get a license to practice occupational therapy within Washington state.
3. Pediatric Experience: Gain experience in dealing with children and adolescents.
4. Strong Communication and Interpersonal Skills: Have good communication and interpersonal skills to deal with students, teachers, and parents.
5. Assistive Technology Knowledge: Acquire skills in adaptive equipment and assistive technology.
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4. Criminal Defense Attorney
Annual salary range: $87,800-$117,200
The criminal defense attorney will litigate the case on behalf of the defendant during criminal court proceedings.
The criminal defender hired by the client performs various activities, like researching factual scenarios of the case, submitting motions to the court, formulating evidence to the judge and jury, and in certain times, negotiating values for a plea bargain with prosecutor to resale his or her client’s case in favor of the latter.
Such counsel may belong to the state and work as a public defender or, alternatively, practice privately.
Skills Needed
1. Juris Doctor (J.D.) Degree: Obtain a J.D. degree from an officially accredited law school.
2. Washington State Bar Association License: Obtain a license to practice law in the state of Washington.
3. Criminal Law Experience: Gain criminal law experience through internship or as a public defender or prosecutor.
4. Analytical and Research Skills: Strong analytical and research skills in order to interpret evidence and have a solid defense.
5. Communication and Persuasion Skills: Excellent communication and persuasion skills to act on behalf of your clients.
5. Real Estate Appraiser
Salary range: $104,800-$107,000 annually
Your services are retained as a real estate appraiser by a property owner when they are seeking to sell real property or refinance a mortgage.
Your task in this highest paying jobs in Washington is to inspect the property and study the local market and overall real estate market with the goal of placing a reasonable value on the subject property.
You go to the property or residence to assess damage and earthquake, flood, or fire hazard, and set value for your client upon your investigation.
Skills Required
1. Real Estate Appraiser License: Obtain a real estate appraiser license from Washington State Department of Licensing.
2. Education and Training: Complete the required education and training hours in real estate appraisal.
3. Real Estate Market Awareness: Familiarize yourself with the local market, trends, prices, and law.
4. Analytical and Problem-Solving Ability: Acquire strong analytical and problem-solving ability to interpret data and produce property values.
5. Attention to Detail: Acquire attention to detail in providing accurate and credible appraisals.
6. Network Administrator
Annual range of salary: $74,200-$105,900
A Network Administrator supervises hardware and software to keep an organization’s data network running. As a Network Administrator, your activity and duty are to administer the company’s data systems, finding and resolving system problems, and offering technical support to users.
Network Administrators typically are members of a group of information technology personnel. They will consult with the different departments in order to specify the company’s future and current technology requirements. Their primary job is to ensure the system is meeting, and will keep meeting, the business requirements.
Skills Required
1. CompTIA Network+ or CCNA Certification: Obtain a network administration certification to prove your competence.
2. Strong Knowledge of Network Protocols: Master network protocols like TCP/IP, DNS, and DHCP.
3. Knowledge of Network Management Tools: Master network management tools such as Cisco Works, SolarWinds, or Nagios.
4. Analytical and Problem-Solving Skills: Have good analytical and problem-solving skills to resolve network issues.
5. Communication and Teamwork Skill: Gain effective communication and teamwork skill to work with other IT experts and stakeholders.
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7. Industrial Engineering
Average annual salary range: $79,300-$107,000
Industrial engineering is one of the disciplines of engineering which combines physical and social sciences and engineering.
This highest paying jobs in Washington is one of the production system engineering fields applied to production systems within the manufacturing process for enabling the design of better and more profitable systems of production.
An Industrial engineer scan a system for its initial conditions, design the improvements, and remove all manpower, energy, money, and material waste.
Skills Required
1. Bachelor’s in Industrial Engineering: Have a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering or another area of study in the same domain.
2. Good Knowledge of Manufacturing Processes: Gain good knowledge of manufacturing processes, including production planning, quality control, and supply chain management.
3. Knowledge of Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma: Gain knowledge of lean manufacturing and Six Sigma methods of efficiency improvement and waste reduction.
4. Analytical and Problem-Solving Skills: Develop strong problem-solving and analytical skills to improve manufacturing systems and processes.
5. Project Management and Communication Skills: Develop good communication and project management skills to manage cross-functional teams and stakeholders.
8. Communications Consultant
Annual salary range: $71,400-$94,000
A communications consultant prepares internal and external media releases for a company. Your role is to provide marketing campaign recommendations, communications policy, and other communications for a firm’s public image. This highest paying jobs in Washington can be freelancers or the employees of a large media consulting firm.
You are hired to provide recommendations and proposals for a firm’s public relations section. You could even create and enforce internal communications plans and carry out training on best practices among workers.
Skills Required
1. Bachelor’s in Public Relations or Communications: A bachelor’s degree in public relations or communications.
2. Knowledge of Communications Principles: General knowledge of communications principles such as messaging, branding, and crisis communications.
3. Social Media and Content Production Knowledge: Social media platforms and content production tool knowledge to create effective communications plans.
4. Good Verbal and Written Communication Skills: Acquire good verbal and written communication skills to communicate good messages and presentations.
5. Strategic Planning and Problem Solving Capacity: Acquire strategic planning and problem solving capacity to develop communications challenges as well as generate winning solutions.
9. Travel Pta
Salary Range: $67,104-$89,651
A traveling Physical Therapy Assistant (PTA) is a person who goes to different locations across the nation in an attempt to help patients recover and heal physically.
As an assistant to a physical therapist, you would help a physical therapist provide patient care in physical therapy clinics, long-term care facilities, and hospitals.
As a travelling PTA, you do the same job but you will not be working within one office but will be flying around and working out of several offices for eight to twelve weeks at a stretch. Because you must maintain many different appointment calendars, organizational skill is essential for this profession.
Skills Needed
1. Strong Organizational and Planning Skills: Have good organizational and planning skills to coordinate travelling arrangements and travel plans.
2. Detail Orientation: Acquire detail orientation to provide timely and correct communication with parents, teachers, and travel vendors.
3. Good Communication and Interpersonal Skills: Acquire good communication and interpersonal skills to communicate with parents, teachers, and travel vendors.
4. Independence to Work: Acquire the independence to work independently to organize travel schedules and logistics.
5. Flexibility and Adaptability: Acquire flexibility and adaptability to manage changed travel schedules and logistics.
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10. Public Health Nutritionist
Salary range: $53,800-$81,500 annually
It is challenging for most to be able to eat well for most individuals because of the busy nature of modern life. Public health nutritionists help clients from their location to establish a healthy relationship with food by conducting education programs and support groups to teach clients about eating well.
Your role as a public health nutritionist will also involve policymaking in the spread of proper diet programs through schools and care centers and designing meal programs to suit rich finances and community habits. This is a very different career path from an average nutritionist because your patients are the population, not individual patients.
Skills Needed
1. Master’s Degree in Public Health or Nutrition: Pursue a master’s degree in public health or nutrition.
2. Clear Knowledge of Nutrition Principles: Possess clear knowledge of nutrition principles, including nutrition science, epidemiology, and health education.
3. Experience with Nutrition Programs in Communities: Develop experience with nutrition programs in communities to design efficient nutrition interventions.
4. Analytical and Problem-Solving Skills: Have good analytical and problem-solving skills to analyze nutrition data and develop effective solutions.
5. Education and Communication Skills: Develop effective education and communication skills to provide services to diverse populations and stakeholders.
11. Welding
Salary range: $54,900-$80,400 annually.
Welding careers are any career involving metal welding as the primary operation of the job. Various different careers employ welders; they include construction, manufacturing, and other activities.
As a welder, you are trained to work with many different automated and handheld devices to complete the work. These devices that you operate cut or put together any number of pieces of metal. Allied occupations include cutting, soldering, and brazing occupations. Sheet metalwork, and ironworking qualify other occupational types that require loads of welding.
Required Skills
1. Welding Certification: You should have welding certification from a known organization, i.e., American Welding Society (AWS).
2. Manual Dexterity and Hand-Eye Coordination: One must possess manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination to operate welding equipment and work with the metal.
3. Knowledge of Welding Process and Materials: You should know about the types of welding processes such as shielded metal arc welding (SMAW), gas metal arc welding (GMAW), and gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW).
4. Safety Procedure and Awareness: You must have safety procedures and awareness to not inflict injury and ensure a safer working culture.
5. Detail Orientation: Acquire detail orientation to make quality welds and meet project specifications.
12. Consulting Utility Forester
Annual Salary range: $40,800-$66,800
As a utility forester consultant, your responsibilities can include patrolling or surveying to find such hazards as trees or brush that touch power or gas lines. You also report to the electric company, landowner, or other parties when it is their turn to cut or trim vegetarian food for safety.
Then you can review and audit current removal and pruning plans, and get out in the field for observing trimming and removal operations. You can also get out in the field for conducting data collection.
Skills Required
1. Starting Education: Bachelor’s degree with a major in forestry or arboriculture.
2. Professional Certification: Certified Forester (CF) from Society of American Foresters (SAF).
3. Technical Proficiency: Gain comprehensive knowledge of urban forestry and arboriculture or tree identification, pruning and removal techniques.
4. Problem Solving: Have a structure in place to ensure that your trees, risks, and mitigation planning are being evaluated properly.
5. Collaborative Competency: Communication and interpersonal skills that are crucial to interacting successfully with utilities, municipalities and other stakeholders.
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13. Laundry Attendant
Annual salary range: $30,600-$37,400
A laundry worker washes and dries linens or clothing that is dirty. Your duties as a laundry worker will be to collect dirty linens or clothing, sort laundry according to color and texture, remove stains, and operate laundry machines to wash and dry items.
Other duties may involve loading and unloading laundry and hanging or folding clean items.
You might need to perform special washing care in fragile and fur-and leather goods. You may also need to service laundry equipment, like clean lint filters of the dryer.
Skills Required
1. Basic Training and Education: One should have taken basic training and education in the laundry operations, that is, washing, sorting, drying, and folding.
2. Physical Strength and Hand-Eye Coordination: Must possess physical strength as well as hand-eye coordination to run laundry machines, move heavy bags of clothes, and work long hours.
3. Attention to Detail: The person should be detail oriented to provide quality service in laundry like stain removal, ironing of the clothes, and folding.
4. Organization and Timeliness: Should possess organization and timeliness less in the acts of scheduling, setting laundry cycles and following deadlines.
5. Customer Service Skills: Developing customer service skills to interact with customers and answering their questions and also settling any disputes.
14. Disease Intervention Specialist.
Salary: $47,600-$74,200
Disease Intervention Specialists create awareness among the people regarding communicable disease and public health. It is where one detects the individual infected with a communicable disease to high-risk groups for making them aware of the prevention for its spread.
As one of the highest paying jobs Washington, it is your responsibility, as a disease intervention specialist, to monitor disease origins, notify the individual and community of issues, and make sensitive issues of public health concern.
Disease interventionists deal with sexually transmitted diseases almost daily, and you must hence be able to and willing to, address quite sensitive issues of sex education. In fact, for most of this work, there is no office because it happens in the field, among those people you serve.
Skills Needed
1. Bachelor’s Degree in Public Health or Similar Discipline: You should have a bachelor’s degree in public health or similar disciplines such as epidemiology, health education, or nursing.
2. Disease Intervention Certification: Must be trained to become disease intervention certified, such as being a Certified Disease Intervention Specialist (CDIS).
3. Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology Training: Acquire training concerning infectious diseases and epidemiology as well as the basic principles related to disease prevention.
4. Analytical and Problem-Solving Skills: Good analytical and problem-solving skills should be developed for monitoring disease outbreaks, risk factors, and planning interventions. 5.
5. Communication and Interpersonal Skills: Good communication and interpersonal skills acquired in order to lead health workers, patients, and community stakeholders.
15. Concrete Foreman
Salary range per annum: $66,800-$100,800
Another highest paying jobs in Washington is a concrete foreman. As a concrete foreman, you lead a contingent of workers who build concrete structures under a construction project.
Project management and people management are your job and responsibility since you need to schedule and allocate work. You are accountable for the proper function of equipment, materials inventory, and workspace planning. You are a technician.
Skills Needed
1. Finish High School: You will have to have completed high school or an equivalent (e.g., a GED).
2. Hands-On Concrete Experience: You need to have experience actually doing work with concrete – mixing, pouring, and smooth-ing it out.
3. Study Concrete Basics: Study the materials (e.g., cement, aggregate, and admixtures) and techniques (placement, finishing, and protecting the concrete).
4. Leadership Skills: You should possess skills in leading teams, making work finish on schedule, and planning projects.
5. Carefully Observe Details: Cross-check your task to make sure it’s right, adheres to safety standards, and suits the project requirement.
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How Can You Prepare for These Highest Paying Jobs in Washington?
Preparation for highest paying jobs in Washington is not rocket science—it’s about setting the right foundations. Here’s where to begin:
- Education and certifications are your building blocks. Surgeons and dentists require medical degrees, but technology jobs such as data engineers or computer hardware engineers need STEM degrees. For management positions such as CEOs, an MBA or business degree tends to open up opportunities. Certifications—such as FAA licenses for pilots or AWS certifications for IT managers—increase your credibility.
- Gain experience by starting small. Entry-level positions like technical writers or court interpreters open up to larger ones. Tech giants’ interns at companies like Amazon become senior specialists like enterprise architects. Build a portfolio: software programmers highlight projects on GitHub, and pharmaceutical reps sell sales success.
- Highlight key skills from the job. Tech jobs need coding and data software, surgeons need calmness under pressure, marketing managers need creativity, and CEOs need leadership and budgeting.
- Network strategically with industry events or LinkedIn connections with professionals. Find mentors—such as investment bankers or chief medical officers—who will guide through the way.
- Be adaptable by learning new tools and trends. Tech careers shift quickly, so data engineers have to learn AI frameworks, and salespeople have to learn CRM software.
Final Tip: Match classroom learning with real-world learning. Shadow doctors if you want to be a surgeon, or experiment with cloud platforms if you want to work in IT. With determination, these careers are attainable.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, highest paying jobs in Washington State are also highly sought after, and most of them have numerous employers competing for the best and brightest.
Some of highest paying jobs Washington State are available as work from home opportunities, but it will vary with the specific job as well as the employer.
The future outlook for the best paying jobs in Washington State is positive, with all industries expanding and evolving.
While a college degree is typically the most desired option for Washington State’s best paying jobs, it is not always a requirement. Sometimes work experience, skills, and certifications are given more weight.
Conclusion
Washington State is replete with profitable career choices, driven by the booming tech economy and expanding demands for skilled personnel. If stability in finance and happiness in life are what you seek, then this is an excellent place to start it all.
With high pay and wonderful benefits, the state’s top jobs have it all. Washington State’s career market is brimming with opportunities, from start to advancement. Start exploring your options today and get the ball rolling on a brighter tomorrow!
References
- www.ziprecruiter.com – 25 of the Highest Paying Jobs in Washington for 2025
- www.indeed.com – 30 High-Paying Jobs in Washington State (With Salary Info)
