However, if you look at total unemployment among people with degrees in physics, it is very low, much lower than the national average unemployment. Also, there is an expectation that everyone with a degree in physics ought to be able to find a job in physics, and when this is not possible, people are very disappointed. Also, some of the employed people will not have been able to find jobs in physics, and will be unhappy about that even if they have found well-paying jobs in other fields. In general, the National Science Foundation is a good source of information about current and past employment trends in various sciences. Physics tends to be one of the higher-paid sciences, but not the highest.
Industry tends to pay more than academia.
I was interested in. I seriously considered doing graduate study in solid-state physics instead, but decided to stay with high energy. It was very easy to find a postdoctoral position, and it was not even terribly difficult to find a faculty position. But what I would suggest, assuming you are not in desperate need of a job right away, is to decide what you really love, and study that. An education in physics will give you an excellent preparation to work in many different fields, other than basic research.