What Jobs Pay
Wage levels, spreads and the sources they come from. The reference half of the site.
Pay is a range, not a number. What an occupation pays runs across a whole distribution, how much of that spread comes from where the work is rather than what the work is, and how to tell a wage figure worth believing from one that has been copied between sites since 2019.
Ask what a job pays and almost every answer you get is a single number. That number is a median, it is usually at least a year old, and it throws away the thing you actually needed — which is how wide the range is and where in it someone like you is likely to sit.
The gap between the 10th and 90th percentile inside one occupation is routinely larger than the gap between two different occupations' medians. Registered nurses, software developers and electricians all spread more than two to one from the bottom of the range to the top. Any answer that begins and ends with a median has thrown away most of the information.
Pay is a range before it is a number
An occupation's wage distribution is published in full: the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentile, nationally and for every state and metropolitan area with enough employers to report. Reading it as a range rather than a point tells you three things a median cannot. How much room there is above where you are. Whether the occupation rewards experience steeply or flatly. And whether a particular offer is unusual or ordinary.
Where the published figures come from, and what they leave out
Federal wage data is a survey of employers, not of workers. That one fact changes how you read every number here and every number anywhere else. It excludes the self-employed entirely, so an occupation with a large self-employed share is only partly described by its published figure. It reports what is actually paid rather than what is advertised, which is why it usually sits below what you see in job postings.
How current the number is
Survey data has a reference period and a publication lag, and they are not the same thing. A figure published this spring describes last spring. Every figure here is dated by the period it describes, not the day it was published — a 2025 survey released in 2026 is 2025 data, and sites that label it otherwise are flattering themselves.
Why location does so much of the work
The same occupation can pay half again as much in one metropolitan area as in another. That is not a fringe effect between extremes — it is the ordinary spread between two large, unremarkable cities. But a wage gap is not the same as a better deal, and separating the two is most of what the location section is about.
In this guide
Finding Out What a Job Actually Pays
10 articles →Pay by Experience and Level
10 articles →Pay by Location
10 articles →Pay by Occupation
10 articles →What Jobs Pay Around the World
10 articles →Common questions
Why is the figure here lower than the salary I see advertised?
Job postings advertise a range designed to attract applicants, and often quote its upper end. The employer survey reports what is actually paid across everyone doing that work, so the middle of it sits below the top of a posting.
Does this cover self-employed and contract work?
No. The wage survey covers employees on an employer's payroll. Where an occupation has a large self-employed share, the published figure describes only the employed part of it, and we say so on the pages where it matters.
How often do these figures change?
Wage figures are published annually and describe a reference period that has already passed. Every figure here carries the period it describes and the date we last checked it against the source.
Can I use this to work out what I should be paid?
You can use it to know whether an offer is ordinary or unusual for the work, in your area, at your level. It cannot tell you what you personally will be offered, because that depends on the employer, your experience and what else they can find.
Why do different salary sites give different numbers for the same job?
Because they are measuring different things u2014 an employer survey, a set of self-reported figures and a scrape of job postings will not agree even when all three are honest. Which to believe is the subject of the first section here.
Do these figures include bonuses and overtime?
The published wage figures cover straight-time gross pay including some incentive pay, but exclude employer contributions such as health coverage and retirement matching. Pricing the whole package is covered under Getting Paid More.
Getting Paid More
Once you know what the work pays, the next question is how to get more of it.
Read it →