Many high-net-worth people make their money by following a standard path well, and some make their money by creating their own path.
The Internal Revenue Service tells the story in a batch of Statistics of Income tables for 2023 that were posted a few days before much of the federal government shut down.
One table shows estate returns by occupational category.
For a look at the 10 occupational categories on the most estate tax returns, along with the average net worth per return in the category, see the gallery above.
What it means: Financial professionals looking for wealth planning and estate planning clients will find many in the obvious occupational categories, along with some in some not-so-obvious categories.
The data: The IRS Statistics of Income tables are not as current as the estate tax figures given in the latest IRS Data Book: The latest Data Book has the 2024 estate tax numbers.
But the 2023 SOI tables are more detailed.
In addition to providing data broken down by occupational category, the SOI tables provide data broken down by relationship to the "decedent."
The IRS listed 1,345 of the 9,024 decedents in 2023 as having the occupation "retired," and it listed 987 as having the category "other." The "other" category includes classifications such as "not employed," "philanthropist" and homemaker.
For the 19 more detailed occupational categories included, the estate tax return counts ranged from 39, for "personal care and service," up to 2,687, with a median of 140.
"Computer and mathematical" ranked 15th and was found on only 63 of the returns.
All of the decedents had plenty of assets: In 2023, the estate tax exemption was $12.92 million for an individual and $25.84 million for a couple.
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