The five roles a user can be assigned in decreasing level of responsibility are:

1. Administrator – can do everything and has complete access to posts, pages, plugins, comments, themes, settings, assign user roles and are able to delete the site.
2. Editor – is able to publish posts/pages, manage posts/pages, upload files, moderate comments as well as manage other people’s posts/pages.
3. Author – can upload files as well as write and publish own posts.
4. Contributor – can write own posts but can’t publish their own post.  Their posts are submitted pending review and an administrator or editor must review and publish their posts. Contributors can’t edit their own publish posts or submit pages as pending review. 
5. Subscriber – can read comments and write comments.