What can you do with a finance degree?
Where finance graduates actually work, and how exposed those jobs are to AI. Built from ACS 2020-2024 5-year PUMS: 67,715 people whose bachelor's degree is in this field, aged 22-64.
Finance graduates mostly end up managing, analysing or advising on money, but no single job holds most of them. About 8 in 100 people with a finance bachelor's degree are financial managers and about 6 in 100 are accountants or auditors. Roughly 5 in 100 each work as financial analysts and personal financial advisors. Smaller groups work as management analysts, lawyers, securities sales agents and loan officers or credit counselors, at about 2 in 100 each.
Many graduates sit outside the jobs we score. About 6 in 100 are managers in other roles and about 4 in 100 are chief executives and legislators. Retail supervisors, retail salespersons and sales representatives are about 1 in 100 each. The spread is wider than in accounting, where one job holds about a third of graduates. This page covers about 61% of finance graduates.
The figures come from Census data on more than 67,000 people with a finance degree, matched to the occupation pages on this site.
How exposed are finance jobs to AI?
We give finance no overall verdict. About 65% of the graduates we can score work in jobs we rate At risk, mainly financial managers, accountants and auditors and financial analysts. That is below the 70% our rule needs for an At risk label. Another 27% work in jobs rated AI-resistant despite the paperwork, led by personal financial advisors, lawyers and securities sales agents, whose work rests on individually held licenses, plus a fiduciary duty to the client for most advisors.
Those are two different stories under one degree, and the research on graduates does not show which will dominate. Our confidence is insufficient to commit, and we score only the 61% of graduates in jobs we cover.
These figures cover the 61% of finance graduates who work in occupations we score. The other 39% work in roles we do not cover (largest: Other Managers; Chief Executives and Legislators; First-Line Supervisors of Retail Sales Workers). Signal 01 averages each job's own structural exposure, weighted by how many graduates work there; it describes tasks, not whether jobs will disappear.
Where finance graduates actually work
These 10 occupations account for 42% of finance graduates. The rest are spread across many smaller occupations, each under 1%. Graduates often work outside the field.
Careers next door to finance, least exposed first
Curated related careers of the main occupations above, ranked by structural exposure (lowest first), so you can see which neighboring routes are less and more exposed.
What the research says about AI and finance graduates
The Census Bureau working paper (September 2026) puts finance in the ninth of its ten exposure groups, just below the software-dominated top group. Its Appendix Table A3 shows finance, from about 75,500 graduates between 2018 and 2022, with a 2024 employment result about 2 points below the average major's change since 2022 and an earnings result close to average. The Dallas Fed names computer science, computer engineering and languages as most exposed and does not report finance.
Employ America says many STEM and business majors have lower unemployment than before the pandemic, without naming finance.
The paper builds exposure from the jobs 21 to 29 year olds with each degree held in 2018 to 2022, and it warns that its measures miss graduate school and self-employment. The studies disagree about whether AI explains any graduate weakness, so we do not read the finance figures as evidence that AI caused them.
Read the full evidence review: what the studies say about AI and graduate jobs →
Degrees whose graduates work in similar jobs
How this page was built
Graduate shares come from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS 2020-2024 5-year PUMS), field of degree "Finance" (code 6207), weighted to the population. Each occupation we cover is scored with the numbers already published on its own page on this site, then averaged by graduate share. Occupations without a page are shown but never scored. Graduates aged 22-64 are included, so the mix reflects the whole working-age group, not only recent graduates. The survey records the most recent occupation of people who were not working when surveyed (unemployed or out of the labor force), and they are counted in it: across the degrees on this site that is about 9 in 100 graduates, between 6 and 13 in 100 depending on the degree, so "work as" on this page means "work or last worked as". Sources: www2.census.gov, www2.census.gov, www.dallasfed.org, employamerica.org, www.bls.gov, www.bls.gov, www.bls.gov, www.bls.gov. This page is general information, not career or educational advice.