Veterinary technican
- Median pay: $33,768
- % who say their job is stressful: 79.1%
Being a veterinary technician is a labor of love. You deal with frightened, injured and sick animals that may struggle, bite and scratch to try to get away.
One of the worst tasks is euthanizing terminally ill animals. "That weighs heavily on us," said Julie Legred, who has had 30 years on the job and is executive director of the National Association of Veterinary Technicians in America.
Related: Veterinary techs' work: A 'labor of love'
Adding to the stress, can be the financial pressures of trying to pay off student loans, she said.
The minimum training needed to qualify as a vet tech is a two-year associate degree, but it often requires a full, four-year degree.
"Most of the veterinary technician college programs have high tuition," she said. "With what we make, loans can be hard to pay off."
Methodology: Starting from a database of more than 9,000 jobs, PayScale used data from over 120,000 respondents who rated their jobs for quality of life factors. The 15 were selected based on the national median pay for workers with at least five or seven years' experience and the percent of workers surveyed who said their jobs were "fairly stressful" or "extremely stressful." Only one job per "job family" was included. PayScale conducted the survey between August 2011 and August 2013.
