What are some careers with good Work/Life Balance?

While there are definitely some careers that tend to be worse than others I think a lot of what you are looking for is more COMPANY dependent than JOB dependent. I've done the same job at multiple companies and all those things vary wildly based on company culture. Get a degree in something you enjoy enough to complete well, most officey type jobs don't care all the much what your degree is in, just that you have one.

I'm a tenured academic and I love my job, but it is exactly the opposite of what you're asking about here. You want a job you don't have to think about outside of work, but when you're an academic there is no outside of work. You work at night and you work on weekends, and summertime is not vacation time, it is time off one part of work that makes room for you to do more of other kinds of work. If you really and truly care about the work you're doing, it's awesome. But if you're looking for a job that funds the activities you really care about but otherwise stays out of your way, it would be a pretty lousy choice.

Careers known for work-life balance are teaching (natural breaks) Teaching fails all the OP's criteria except time off.

Major in French. But seriously where will probably have a much greater influence than what. This can be Big like what country you choose. France and Australia are well-known for work-life balance. America and China are not. This can also be Small like which company you choose. Note – not role but company. LinkedIn and REI are said to be great employers. That being said, they have everything from HR jobs to legal departments to IT careers to marketing and sales forces. So it's not about the role as much as the company. For example, eBay and Electronic Arts are known to be quite difficult places to work, as are many banks and law firms. They also have HR jobs, legal departments, IT careers, and marketing and sales forces. They can also be Small and geographic. You're going to have a different experience in Portland or Denver, as you would in New York or San Francisco. That's Supply and Demand kicking in. The more demand there is to be in a place, the harder you'll have to work to be there. There's great jobs to be had on North Sea oil platforms – high pay and lots of vacation time – for this very reason. In terms of careers, there probably are general guidelines. Lawyers and bankers work legendary hours. And by legendary, I mean lots. Careers known for work-life balance are teaching (natural breaks), medicine (hard to get into), firemen (hard to get into) and entrepreneurship (you're the boss). That doesn't mean people in these fields work less, but rather the time is allocated differently. A teacher has three months a year "off". Doctors and firemen can often have bulked schedules around certain days. Entrepreneurs work heaps but have more control of their time. So if you want the best work-life balance possible, I would say it's probably that of a teacher or doctor in Bordeaux, or potentially an entrepreneur in Perth. Maybe it's not a job working for Electronic Arts in New York or eBay in San Francisco. Overall, if you want the best work-life balance possible work hard now. The more desirable you are to employers later – in any field – the more shots you'll get to call. If you are a chemical engineer with a minor in Finance that speaks fluent English, Arabic, and Mandarin with a 4.0 GPA, you will probably have a very good work-life balance. If you are a liberal arts major with a 2.0 GPA and no extracurricular activities, you will probably also have a very good work-life balance, because you will be unemployed and on benefits. Everything else will be somewhere in the middle. Point being, choose something you love doing, and do well at it. And minor in French.

You'll be better off doing something you love, or at least like. This presumes that what you love or like doing is at least reasonably marketable. A whole lot of people got the "do what you love" advice, proceeded to major in some completely unmarketable field, and are now staggeringly in debt. (And certainly not working in their fields.) There is no guarantee that the world will be willing to pay you for what you love to do, simply because you love to do it. My advice: minor in something that you love; major in something that will get you a job. That said, resist the temptation to get some sort of hyper-specific "hot field" degree; you don't want to have something on your (very expensive, presumably) diploma that will be the educational equivalent of acid-washed jeans in a couple of years. If it's a field that didn't exist 10 or 20 years ago, consider the possibility that it might not exist in another 10 or 20 and think hard about betting tens of thousands of dollars on it.

Academia is known for really good vacation policies. You get paid below market wages, but it's not uncommon to start out with 4 weeks vacation plus all the holidays. ...during which you will likely be doing research, applying for grants, writing/publishing, working on committees, obliged to answer students' emails, rotating through departmental administrative duties, preparing coursework and syllabi for next semester, etc. (Which is all a way of saying that among the academics I know, virtually all of them work in some way over a fairly significant portion of their vacations and holidays.)

Sorry - I should clarify what I mean by "academis" I meant doing non-academic jobs at an academic institution. I'm an IT employee at a local university, and one of the reasons I took the job (and its attendant pay cut) was lots of vacation time and a somewhat slower pace than the depths of corporate hell. There's craziness (and political bs that tries my ability to let things roll off my back), but overall less stress than corporate life. I recognize that actual academic jobs are full of work and not a lot of pay.

You need both work-life balance and stability-- so that you don't have to worry about losing your job and having to prove what a great had worker you are in order to keep your job or get a new one. This is going to be limited to credentialed jobs where your credential and experience is more important than "commitment to the firm." Pharmacist, Physical Therapist, Dentist, optometrist, actuary. Many government lawyers seem to do pretty well for themselves as far as work/life balance, but those jobs seem to be hard to get these days, based on my friends' experience trying to get out of life in a law firm. Actually, many "second line" government jobs are good for this. My job as a government scientist was as stressful as any other science job outside of academia, but the administrative staff didn't seem to be facing a large worktime stress, and they accrued vacation at the same rate as the rest of us. Actually, the physical therapists I know seem to thread this needle pretty well.

I feel like I should say something about tech (software engineer, product manager, qa, etc.). Tech has been given a bad rep due to startup culture, the idea that you have to be a genius to get anything done, and video game companies. Most tech jobs don't require you to put in twelve hour days or superhuman levels of talent. For every employee at Google that invented a programming language, or the startup founder who slept underneath their desk, there are tons of normal, 9-5 corporate tech jobs (probably even at Google itself). They're in boring, non-glamorous fields like enterprise software, middleware, or data analysis. You don't hear about them because these companies have no desire to change the world, and are not pushing the limits of technology. The jobs often consist of non-cutting edge tasks like replacing eight-year-old technologies with two-year-old ones, or making yet another permutation of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Create,_read,_update_and_delete app. Even if you ignore industry trends, there's a lot of old stuff out there that needs maintenance and can't be replaced, so your obsolete knowledge is in demand somewhere. Advanced degrees are rare and often looked upon with suspicion. You are unlikely to require another $100K in debt in addition to an undergraduate degree. Going to have to repeat what others have said - work / life balance is something that you'll have to demand from your company and make it work yourself. But in tech, you'll be paid significantly above average - if you want that month long vacation, but you only get two weeks paid, just take the next two weeks unpaid, if that puts you into poverty then you're spending too close to your means. The cool thing about computers is that they literally run themselves - you don't need to be physically be around for things to work (if you built it correctly). While mobile phones seem to allow your employer to contact you at all hours, technology offers a more common benefit - you can telecommute, avoiding time spent commuting and possibly a costly move. You can see your family more, or work from non-home locations. In the long term you can work as a highly skilled contractor and choose your own hours (and work only as much as you need to survive).