Editorial policy

Sources

Pay, employment, outlook and training-cost figures come only from official federal data: the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Department of Education, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and O*NET. Facts about becoming a professional (programs, exams, fees, hours, licenses, renewal) must come from the organization that sets them: the certification or exam body, the program accreditor, a state licensing board or a federal agency. Every guide lists its sources with the date each was checked. We do not use salary figures from job boards, self-reported salary sites or proprietary models, and we never quote pay for a specialty that has no official data.

How pages are written and checked

1. Data first. Each career starts from a research file generated from the official data: its pay, states, metros, employers, trend, projections, training programs, O*NET tasks and the BLS handbook text.
2. Draft. The written sections are drafted to a fixed brief: only figures from the research file, every other fact verified on an official source and cited, plain language, no boilerplate shared between careers.
3. Automated checks. A checker rejects drafts with figures that are not in the research file, missing sources, links to pages that do not exist, banned filler phrases or missing sections.
4. Fact-check. A separate review pass, which did not write the draft, opens every cited source, checks each exam, fee, program length and licensing statement against it, corrects what does not match and records what it checked. A guide is published only after this pass.
5. Publication checks. Before publishing, the site is checked for broken links, missing sources and pages without their core data.

Use of AI

We use AI tools to draft the written sections of career pages and guides and to carry out the fact-checking pass described above, always against the cited sources. The pay tables, rankings, maps, charts, trend figures and tax estimates are calculated directly from the official data by code, not written by AI. We disclose this because readers should know how a page was made; the standard for every page is the same whichever tools are used: accurate, sourced and useful.

Rules for numbers

• Every figure names its source and data year next to it or in the section's source line.
• Gaps stay gaps: figures BLS does not publish are shown as not published, never estimated.
• Percentiles are never presented as pay by years of experience.
• Specialty and broad job titles are labeled with the official occupation their figures describe.
• Estimates we calculate (cost-of-living adjustment, take-home pay, payback) are labeled as estimates and their method is published.

What we do not do

We do not promise incomes, rank schools or recommend specific training providers, and we do not give individual tax, legal or financial advice. Licensing rules change and vary by state, so guides link to official state resources for the final word.

Corrections

If you find an error, email [email protected] with the page, the statement and the source that contradicts it. We check every report against the source. Confirmed errors are corrected on the page, and a correction to a guide's facts moves its "checked" date. No corrections have been made since the site launched; significant corrections will be listed here with their date.

Updates and dates

"Data updated" dates change only when the underlying data is rebuilt from a new release. A guide's "checked" date changes only when its sources are checked again. Salary-page titles carry the year of the current pay data release and change when BLS publishes new figures each spring.