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- Nearly two-thirds of US workers have held a retail job at some point in their career.
- That includes several CEOs who started out in hourly positions at the companies they now run.
- Here are the median wages for workers at several top retail companies, listed from lowest to highest.
Roughly one in 10 workers in the US works in retail.
Widen the view to people who have worked in that industry at some point in their careers, and the number rockets up to six in 10, according to a 2019 report by the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research organization.
For many, retail is a first job; for others, it's a lifelong career.
Several top retail CEOs started out in hourly positions at the companies they now run.
To get a sense of how much retail workers made in 2025, Business Insider used AlphaSense to search the latest proxy statements for median employee pay data that publicly traded firms are required to disclose to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
That means half of a company's workers earned more than its median employee, and half earned less. The range can vary considerably because many retail companies offer part-time and seasonal work.
For many retail workers, an individual's annual earnings depended on their hourly wage and the number of hours they worked.
The following list includes retailers with a market capitalization of more than $10 billion that have so far filed proxy statements for the 2025 fiscal year, sorted from lowest to highest annual pay.