The Most Common Job in Every U.S. State · Fast Food Leads 17
The most common job in 17 states is fast-food worker; retail sales and cashiers lead in 11 and home health aides in 10. White-collar work almost never tops a state — software developers lead in exactly one, Washington, and general operations managers in four. Scale is concentrated: California's top occupation employs 970,000 people, New York 663,000 and Texas 461,000, against roughly 8,000 in Vermont and Alaska. The clearest structural signal is the care economy — home health aides now lead in ten aging and coastal states, a category that grows with demographics rather than the business cycle.
Why this matters for B2B
This is a map of what most American households actually earn, and it argues for the value tier. Across the 17 fast-food states and the 11 retail states, demand concentrates on price-first, replace-when-broken categories: basic furniture, fans and cooling, storage, kitchenware, everyday hardware. The ten home-health-aide states point somewhere more specific — mobility aids, bath safety, adjustable beds and easy-clean surfaces. Where freight movers or truck drivers top the list, you are looking at a distribution state, and the demand is warehouse consumables, racking, packaging and pallet handling. Read against the 30 highest-paying U.S. jobs (c108), household incomes (c9) and the senior population map (c96).
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (data as of May 2025). Visualization: Visual Capitalist / Voronoi. Original infographic reproduced above with source attribution intact.