Best Internships 2017: Where Do Interns Make The Most Money?

Interns throughout the U.S. can rejoice. It's entirely possible to bring home a higher salary than the average full-time worker, at least if you stick it out for a full year.

According to a report released Tuesday by job site Glassdoor, the median annual salary for a full-time U.S. worker is $51,350. While a typical internship lasts just a few months or a season, some companies' internships come with such a hefty paycheck that if the position were held for a full year, the intern would end up with far more money than the median salary.

Unsurprisingly, many of the top-paying internship programs were in fields like technology and finance. Facebook dominated Glassdoor’s list of top paying internships, with a year-long salary of about $96,000 for an intern. An intern who worked Bank of America, last on the list at No. 25, for a full year, would earn about $55,000.

The 25 highest paying internship programs, according to Glassdoor, are listed below alongside the median monthly pay for each.

1. Facebook: $8,000
2. Microsoft: $7,100
3. ExxonMobil: $6,507
4. Salesforce: $6,450
5. Amazon: $6,400
6. Apple: $6,400
7. Bloomberg L.P.: $6,400
8. Yelp: $6,400
9. Yahoo: $6,080
10. VMWare: $6,080
11. Google: $6,000
12. NVIDIA: $5,770
13. Intuit: $5,440
14. Juniper Networks: $5,440
15. Workday: $5,440
16. BlackRock: $5,400
17. Adobe: $5,120
18. MathWorks: $5,120
19. Qualcomm: $5,040
20. Capital One: $5,000
21. Chevron: $5,000
22. Accenture: $4,960
23. Deutsche Bank: $4,640
24. AIG: $4,616
25. Bank of America: $4,570

The hefty pay likely has a lot to do with where the companies are located.

“Part of it is definitely driven by geography,” Scott Dobroski, Glassdoor’s community expert, told the Washington Post. “More than half of them are headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area or New York.”

Interning still comes with negative connotations. In 2014, an estimated 97 percent of large employers hired interns, putting the number of interns at upwards of two million, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. It’s likely that at least half of those were unpaid, according to Ross Perlin, the author of "Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy."

In recent years, a number of lawsuits have emerged over unfair working conditions without pay. Two interns sued Fox Searchlight Pictures in 2013 after they claimed that while working on the film "Black Swan," they completed tasks that paid employees were usually responsible for, without getting paid. Another group of interns sued Hearst Corporation, alleging that the company violated labor laws by not paying them for internships at magazines like Cosmopolitan. In 2013, Conde Nast shut down a number of its internship programs after unpaid interns sued the company.

“What we see anecdotally and hear from employers and in policymaking is a push toward paying for interns, as well as guidelines within companies that they’re being treated more like full-time or part-time employees,” Dobroski said. “They’ve no longer just come in for babysitting. The internship is designed for you to get experience.”