About

About MetroWages

MetroWages answers one question as directly as possible: what does this job pay in this city?

Salary information online is mostly either crowdsourced and thin, or locked behind a job-board login. The authoritative source — the Bureau of Labor Statistics OEWS survey — publishes everything publicly, but as a 150,000-row spreadsheet that nobody is going to open. This site is that spreadsheet, turned into 2,000 readable pages across 25 metro areas and 145 occupations.

What we do differently

• One source, cited everywhere. BLS OEWS 2024. No mixing in survey panels, job postings, or self-reported figures that would quietly pull the numbers around.
• No filled-in gaps. When BLS suppresses an estimate, the page does not exist. We never model a number to complete a template.
• Full distribution, not just a median. Every page carries the 10th, 25th, 75th, and 90th percentiles, plus the local employment count and the sampling margin.
• Context that changes decisions. Pay is compared against the metro's all-occupation median as well as the national figure, because the local baseline is the one that matters.
• No JavaScript, no tracking scripts. Static HTML that loads fast and reads fine without a browser.

Who this is for

People negotiating an offer or weighing a move, journalists and researchers who need a citable local figure, and anyone who wants to know whether a salary is normal for their city before they accept it.

How to cite this site

Cite the underlying data rather than us where possible, since that is the primary source:

Contact and corrections

Data errors take priority over everything else. If a figure here disagrees with the published OEWS table, tell us which page and which value, and we will fix the pipeline.

See the methodology for the full build description, and the author page for who maintains the site.