Promoting students’ interest in physics is a key goal of physics education. Describing students’ types of interest provides a great opportunity to offer practical and gender-independent recommendations to teachers for designing interesting learning activities. We investigated students’ types of interest in physics and their association with different student characteristics in a cross-cohort study involving German-speaking students aged 14 to 16 years (N = 1219). We assessed the students’ interest in a classical and a modern physics content area, namely mechanics and particle physics, as well as different student characteristics, such as physics-related self-concept. The collected data on students’ interest was analysed using mixed Rasch models to unveil qualitative differences in the assessed constructs between different groups of students. The study showed that the vast majority of students (71%) can be categorised into one single type of interest in both content areas. Students of this first interest type were only interested in physics content set in certain contexts, for example, the context “one’s own body”. The second type of interest was specific to the different content areas. Students of the second interest type had relatively high physics-related self-concept and were interested in physics content, even when set in scientific or technical contexts. Whether students belong to one or the other type of interest was best described with a model comprising their degree of physics-related self-concept and their sex. Finally, we introduced the Hierarchy Of students’ Levels of Interest in Physics (HOLIP) to describe the relative interestingness of different contexts for the first type of interest (i.e. the vast majority of students). We recommend to use the HOLIP as a guideline for designing learning activities that promote interest in physics.