How we source figures
Every number on this site comes from somewhere, and we tell you where. This page explains what we use, what we will not use, and what our sourcing does not cover — because a site that asks you to trust its figures owes you the means to check them.
Where the numbers come from
Wage figures come from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program run by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It is a survey of employers, not of workers, and it reports a full distribution rather than a single number: the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentile for each occupation, nationally, by state and by metropolitan area. Where we show a range, that is where it comes from.
Employment growth and decline come from the BLS Employment Projections program. Hiring, openings and quits come from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. Task and skill descriptions come from O*NET, maintained for the Department of Labor. Federal pay scales come from the Office of Personnel Management.
Rules about what an employer must do — posted salary ranges, minimum wage, overtime, final pay — come from the statute or regulation itself, or from the state agency that enforces it. Where a rule is genuinely contested between sources, we say so rather than picking one.
International figures come from national statistics offices where an occupational breakdown exists, and from the OECD or ILOSTAT where it does not. This is a real difference in resolution and we do not paper over it: for a handful of countries we can tell you what a specific occupation pays, and for most we can only tell you about a sector or an average.
What survey data cannot tell you
Three limits matter enough to state plainly.
It excludes the self-employed. The wage survey covers employees on an employer’s payroll. If a trade, a profession or a craft is substantially self-employed, the published figure describes only the employed part of it.
It has a reference period and a publication lag, and they are not the same thing. A figure published this spring describes last spring. When we show a figure we show the period it describes, not the date it was released.
It is a distribution, not a promise. A median is the middle of a range that is frequently twice as wide at the top as at the bottom. Nothing here tells you what you personally will be offered.
What we will not publish
We do not republish figures from salary sites that do not name their own source. A number with no provenance cannot be checked, cannot be dated, and cannot be corrected when it changes — and a great many of them circulate for years after the underlying figure has moved.
We do not fill a gap with a plausible estimate. Where we do not have a figure, the sentence that would have contained it does not appear. An empty space is honest; a confident wrong number is not.
We do not present one side of a rule that has two simultaneously correct answers. Where an obligation depends on which state the work is done in, or on when something was agreed, we say which version applies rather than printing whichever is more common.
Dates and rechecking
Every figure carries the date we last checked it against its source. Wage data is checked when the annual release lands. Statutory figures — minimum wages, salary thresholds, posting requirements — are checked on the schedule the relevant agency publishes on, and out of cycle when a change is announced.
Corrections
If a figure here is wrong, we would rather know. Tell us what it is and what it should be, and where you saw the better number, and we will check it against the source and correct the page. Corrections to a figure are made on the page itself along with the date.