Methodology

How these wage figures are produced

Every number on this site comes from one source: the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey. Nothing is modelled, crowdsourced, or estimated by us. This page explains exactly how the raw survey becomes a salary page.

1. Source data

We use the May 2024 OEWS metropolitan area dataset published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The file is a single workbook of roughly 150,000 rows covering every metropolitan statistical area, every surveyed occupation, and the wage distribution for each combination.

2. Filtering rules

The raw workbook mixes several granularities. We keep only the rows that describe a whole metro and a whole occupation, because anything else produces a page that answers the wrong question.

• Cross-industry only. Industry-specific rows are dropped — "registered nurses in hospitals" is a different query from "registered nurses in Austin".
• All ownership combined. Private, state, and local government employers are already aggregated in the rows we keep.
• Detailed occupations only. Broad groups such as "Management Occupations" are excluded; only six-digit SOC codes become pages.
• Surviving estimates only. BLS suppresses a figure when too few workers were surveyed or when publishing it would identify an employer. Suppressed rows are deleted, never filled in.
• Minimum employment. A page needs at least 50 people employed locally, so the numbers are not built on a rounding error.

3. Which pages get built

Rather than emitting every one of the roughly 140,000 possible occupation-and-metro combinations, the build selects pages in two steps:

1. The 25 largest metro areas by total employment are selected.
2. Within each metro, the 80 largest occupations by local employment are selected.

That produces 2,000 salary pages, plus 25 metro guides and 145 national occupation pages. Selecting occupations per metro rather than from a global list matters: it guarantees every page describes a job that is genuinely employed in that local market, instead of a template aimed at a combination nobody works in.

4. The national comparison

Metro pages compare local pay against the official BLS national OEWS estimate for the same occupation, taken from the national workbook published alongside the metro file. That figure covers all areas, including the non-metropolitan areas this site does not publish pages for, so it is the correct national benchmark.

5. Hourly figures

OEWS publishes an hourly median directly, and where it exists we use it. For percentile rows on ranking tables, the hourly column is the annual figure divided by 2,080 hours, which is the standard full-time-year conversion. Those derived values are labelled as such in the table captions.

6. Known limits

• Wages, not total compensation. OEWS excludes bonuses, stock, and employer benefit contributions. Jobs where a large share of pay is equity or bonus will look understated.
• Employers only. Self-employed workers and independent contractors are out of scope. Occupations with heavy freelancing — design, consulting, real estate — are less well represented.
• Nominal, not adjusted. No cost-of-living adjustment is applied anywhere on the site. A higher median in an expensive metro does not mean higher real purchasing power.
• Sampling error. Each estimate carries a relative standard error, which we surface on the individual pages. Where that error is wide, the number is a range in practice, not a point.
• A lag. The May 2024 survey was published in April 2025. Pay in a fast-moving occupation may have moved since.
• Not career advice. These are market aggregates. They say nothing about what any individual should be paid.

7. Corrections

If a figure here disagrees with the published OEWS table, the BLS table is correct and we have a bug. Report it via the contact details on the about page and we will fix the pipeline rather than the number.

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