Dave Ramsey Surveyed 10,167 Wealthy Americans. This Career Produced the Most Millionaires.

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On a recent episode of The Ramsey Show, Dave Ramsey told a 22-year-old caller named Mark something most new graduates never hear: “We did the largest survey a millionaire’s ever done, mark 10,167 of them. One of the things we researched was what occupations showed up the most often among millionaires. Number one occupation among millionaires? Engineer.” Mark, calling in on June 15 after landing his first electrical engineering job in Lincoln, Nebraska at $89,000 a year, was asking how much rent he could afford. The headline finding looks like career advice, but it is really a behavior story. If you take it that way, you risk choosing a major or a job for the wrong reason and missing the actual mechanic that built the wealth in Ramsey’s data.

The verdict: the job title is a clue to behavior

Ramsey’s claim is accurate but easy to misread. Engineer was the most frequently occurring occupation in his National Study of Millionaires, detailed in Baby Steps Millionaires. The full top five, in order, were engineer, accountant, teacher, business and sales, and attorney. Medical doctors did not make the top five. The teacher entry is the giveaway. Teaching is not a high-income field, yet it outranks medicine. That only makes sense once you accept the study’s own conclusion: roughly one-third of the millionaires surveyed never earned a six-figure income in a single year. Consistent behavior did the heavy lifting.

The mechanic underneath is boring and powerful: a high savings rate compounded for a long time. Mark’s $89,000 starting salary sits well above the $37.53/hour average for total private workers in May 2026 and roughly double the $1,235 median weekly earnings for full-time workers in Q1 2026. The income gives him room. The behavior decides whether that room becomes wealth or evaporates into lifestyle.

Here is what disciplined behavior on Mark’s salary looks like if he invests 15% of gross income into a tax-advantaged retirement account starting at 22 and earns a long-run market return:

That single habit, applied for a working career, is what Ramsey’s data is really measuring. The job title showed up because engineering tends to attract people who plan, optimize, and tolerate delayed gratification. Those traits are what the survey captured.

The variable that changes everything: your fixed costs

The factor that determines whether an $89,000 earner becomes the millionaire in the study or just another high-income spender is housing. Ramsey gave Mark a hard ceiling: “25% of your take home pay or less” on rent alone, and pushed him lower, saying “the least possible rent that you can get by is the best number, but 25% is your max.”

Co-host George Kamel framed the trap. “If you can live dorm life for two or three years and just stack cash, rent something that your mom, when she comes to visit you, goes, I thought you were doing well… Don’t buy a new car. Just keep the same car, even though all your colleagues will be like, what are you doing?” The math of why this matters is brutal at the national level. The U.S. personal savings rate fell to 3.7% in Q1 2026, the lowest in eight quarters, down from 5.2% a year earlier. Americans are earning more and saving less. Per capita disposable income rose to $68,359 while average annual household expenditures climbed to $78,535 in 2024. Income growth is being consumed.

Geography helps Mark. Nebraska’s cost-of-living index sits at 90.1, with real per-capita income of $80,681, ranking seventh nationally. The same paycheck buys more runway in Lincoln than it would in San Francisco or New York. Take a low rent in a low-cost state, hold the line on the car, and the savings rate that the millionaire study rewards becomes achievable on autopilot.

What to do with this

1. Calculate your real rent ceiling. Take your monthly take-home pay after taxes and retirement contributions, multiply by 0.25, and treat that as a maximum. Aim lower if you want to save aggressively for a house down payment.
2. Automate 15% of gross income into retirement accounts before the money hits your checking account. Capture any employer 401(k) match first, then fill a Roth IRA, then return to the 401(k).
3. Keep the car you have until the math forces a change. A paid-off used vehicle is the single largest lifestyle-creep defense available to a new graduate.

The survey’s real headline is that people who live well below their means for decades get rich, and engineers happen to do that more often than most.

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