The income interactive tool includes the figures on everyone from accountants (there are 62,552 of them in Australia and their median income is $69,789) to zoologists (there are 608, earning $62,380 on average). You can compare the median income of similar jobs to yours by pressing the ‘in your category’ button. This will show all the jobs grouped together in the same family, which is useful if you want to check out how your current job compares to similar types of roles. Surgeons are unsurprisingly the highest-paid. Of the 30 highest-paid jobs in Australia, all but two are medical specialists. Brain surgeons are the highest earners, with a median annual income of $423,649. They are followed by otorhinolaryngologists (ear, nose and throat specialists) with $395,391 and urologists (experts of the urinary system) with $392,625. Judges are fourth with $380,743 and cardiologists (heart specialists) are fifth with $378,582.

If you want to earn the big bucks without having to go through medical or law school, become a politician. Members of parliament rank 31st out of more than 1000 jobs, with the median earnings being a tidy $184,840 a year. These median annual taxable-income figures include not only the job’s salary, but any possible additional earnings from rent, bank interest, dividends and bonuses. They are based on the amounts people stated as their earnings before tax but after deductions on their 2015/16 tax returns. Sales assistants are the most common job with 293,139 people, and the rarest jobs are bungy jump masters and hunting guides, with six people in each. The most female-dominated job out there is mothercraft nurse (a nurse who cares for babies). There were 201 of them in Australia, all female.

But on the flipside, less than 1 per cent of carpenters, fitters, concreters, diesel motor mechanics, plumbers, bricklayers, air-conditioner servicers and panel beaters are female. Some jobs have an almost even split of male and female practitioners, including cooks, management accountants and university tutors. The median income for a chief executive is $73,113, but there are more than 160,000 of them in Australia, and of these only a handful are in charge of ASX200 companies.

The highest-paid chief executives in 2016 were Peter and Stephen Lowy of Westfield ($26,255,778) and Nicholas Moore of Macquarie Group ($25,725,006). Stephen and Peter Lowy. Credit:Louise Kennerley But keep in mind the median figure for each job includes everyone who listed it as their primary source of income, so it will include full-timers, part-timers and casuals. If your occupation has a lot of part-time staff it might have driven down the median income. For example, the median annual income of a checkout operator is $25,596, but 87 per cent of them work part-time, so it's not what a full-timer in this job would take home in a year. Among full-time checkout operators, the median annual earning is $39,520. To give a better indication of what someone doing your job for 40 hours a week can expect to earn, we have also included the median full-time income for your job category in the interactive tool, as well as the ratio of full-time and part-time employees.

For more detailed information about the data and how to interpret it, read on. Next in our series, we'll look at the highest paying jobs that don't need a degree. Troubleshooting: If you encounter an issue with the interactive, please email craig.butt@theage.com.au About the data We match you to your occupation’s official title based on what you type in, and your official title might differ slightly from what you entered. For example, army commandos, petty officers in the navy and air force surveillance officers are all classed as ‘defence force members’. We didn’t come up with these job titles ourselves - they were devised by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and there are more than 1000. The Australian Taxation Office has adopted these codes for its own data.

You might not be able to enter your job title in the interactive if you work in a niche area or if what you do is the type of job that wouldn’t have existed five to 10 years ago. The closest match to your role might appear in an occupation’s ‘nec’ (not elsewhere classified) designation. Likewise, some people didn’t provide enough detail on their job so they got sorted into the ‘type not specified’ pile. The figures for these titles tends to be based on a small number of unsorted people’s earnings, so may not be accurate. Illustration: Matt Golding Credit: We have used the median because it is a good guide of what you could expect to earn in that profession. If you got everyone in your job to line up from highest-paid to lowest-paid, the median income would be that of the person at the exact midpoint of that line. The median full-time income shows the amount for your job category. A job category is the next level of detail provided by the job codes. While there are more than 1000 job titles, these form almost 400 job categories. For example, ‘livestock farmers’ is the job category that combines the job titles beef, deer, goat, pig, poultry and sheep farmers. To see which other jobs are in the same category as your own, click the ‘in your category’ button on the interactive. Larger jobs may be in a category by themselves.