Methodology

Pay data

Pay figures come from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The current figures are the May 2025 estimates, published April 30, 2026. OEWS surveys employers, not workers or job ads: about 1.1 million workplaces report the jobs and wages of their employees over a three-year cycle, and BLS weights the answers to represent all wage and salary jobs in the country.

OEWS wages include base pay, tips, commissions, cost-of-living allowances, hazard pay and production bonuses. They exclude overtime premiums, shift differentials, year-end and other non-production bonuses, and employer-paid benefits such as health insurance and retirement contributions. Self-employed people, owners and partners of unincorporated businesses, household workers and unpaid family workers are not counted, which matters for jobs such as real estate agents, barbers, personal trainers and photographers, where many people work for themselves.

We use the national, state, metropolitan-area, industry and ownership (private and government) files. Metro areas are metropolitan statistical areas; BLS publishes nonmetropolitan areas separately, and we do not show them.

Medians, means and percentiles

The median is the wage in the middle: half of the workers in a job earn more and half earn less. The mean is the average of all wages, which a small number of very high earners can pull up, so we lead with the median. For all US jobs in May 2025 the median was $50,980 and the mean $69,770.

Percentiles show the spread. The 10th percentile is the wage that 10% of workers earn less than; the 90th is the wage that 90% earn less than. The middle 50% earn between the 25th and 75th percentiles. Percentiles are not experience levels: they mix workers of every seniority, state, employer and schedule. When we answer "what do new workers make", we say so and point to the lower percentiles without claiming they are starting salaries.

Hourly and annual. BLS publishes both for most jobs and computes annual wages as hourly × 2,080. For jobs that are paid by the year but work fewer hours, such as teachers and pilots, BLS publishes annual wages only, and we show no hourly figure.

Missing and top-coded figures

BLS withholds a figure when too few employers responded or when publishing it could identify an employer. We show those cells as "not published" or "—", rank only the states with published figures and never estimate the gap. Wages at or above $115.00 an hour or $239,200 a year are "top-coded": BLS reports only that the wage is at least that high. We show those as "$239,200+".

Estimates also carry sampling error. BLS publishes a relative standard error for each employment and mean-wage estimate; small states and metros have larger errors, so differences of a few hundred dollars between places are not meaningful.

Cost of living

To compare pay across places we use the Bureau of Economic Analysis regional price parities (RPP) for 2024, which measure how the prices of the same goods and services, including rent, differ from the national average (US = 100). Adjusted pay = pay ÷ (RPP ÷ 100). A $100,000 salary in a state with an RPP of 110 buys about what $90,909 buys at national-average prices.

RPPs cover prices, not taxes, and are averages for a whole state or metro area: costs inside a state can differ a lot. Treat adjusted pay as a comparison tool, not a budget.

Trends and inflation

Pay trends use the May OEWS releases from 2015 to 2025. BLS moved from the 2010 to the 2018 Standard Occupational Classification between 2019 and 2021. We use an earlier year only when the occupation's code is unchanged or matches exactly one old code in the official crosswalk; otherwise the series starts after the change. Years in which the median was top-coded also end the series.

Trends are shown in nominal dollars (the dollars of each year) and in May 2025 dollars, adjusted with the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U, US city average, May of each year) to match the OEWS reference month.

Outlook and education

Projected growth, openings and self-employment shares come from the BLS Employment Projections for 2025–2035. Openings combine new jobs with the replacement of workers who retire or change occupations. "Typical entry education", "work experience" and "on-the-job training" are BLS assignments for the typical path into each job; individual employers may ask for more or less. Projection employment includes the self-employed, so it differs from OEWS employment.

Job titles and how careers map to official data

People search for "ultrasound tech" or "CRNA", while BLS publishes "diagnostic medical sonographers" and "nurse anesthetists". Each of our 150 careers maps the titles people use to one occupation in the Standard Occupational Classification, using the alternate titles in O*NET 31.0. Variants share one page, and the official occupation and its code appear under every page heading.

Specialties such as labor and delivery or travel nursing have no separate official pay data. Their pages show the parent occupation's figures with a visible label and never state a specialty pay figure. Broad titles such as "nurse", "therapist" or "engineer" cover several occupations, so their pages compare those occupations instead of inventing one number. We do not publish pages for jobs with no fitting official data, such as perfusionists or anesthesiologist assistants.

How-to-become guides

Each guide starts from a research file for its career: our computed figures, the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, O*NET and College Scorecard data. The steps, exams, fees, program lengths and licensing rules are then checked against the organizations that set them: exam bodies, accreditors, licensing boards and federal agencies. Every guide lists those sources with the date they were checked.

Drafts are written with AI assistance under a written brief and then fact-checked in a separate pass that opens each cited source and corrects anything that does not match. Our editorial policy describes the process and its limits. Licensing rules vary by state, so guides describe the national framework and link to the U.S. Department of Labor's CareerOneStop License Finder for each state's rules.

Training cost and ROI

Training cost in each guide adds up the required program and exam or license fees. Program cost uses the College Scorecard: the median published in-state tuition and fees of public colleges that offer the program at that credential level, multiplied by the program's typical length, with private-college tuition shown for comparison. Scorecard groups programs by four-digit field and publishes tuition by institution, not by program, so this is a typical figure, not a price quote. For graduate and professional programs, where Scorecard tuition does not apply, guides use the median federal loan debt of graduates and the cited program sources.

Payback is the training cost divided by how much more the career's median pays than the median for all US jobs ($50,980). The 20-year earnings in the ROI tool are the median wage times the years left after training in a 20-year window, minus the cost. Both are pre-tax, in today's dollars, and ignore financial aid, loan interest, earnings while training (including paid apprenticeships) and how pay grows over a career. They are for comparing careers, not for predicting what one person will earn.

Tax estimates

Take-home pay on the hourly pages and in the salary calculator is an estimate for tax year 2026. Federal income tax uses the brackets and standard deduction in IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32; Social Security (6.2% up to $184,500 of wages) and Medicare (1.45%, plus 0.9% above $200,000 for single filers) follow IRS Publication 15. State income tax and employee payroll taxes, such as disability or paid family leave insurance, follow each state's 2026 rules. Hourly pages assume a single filer with no dependents and no other income; local income taxes are not included. This is not tax advice: deductions, credits and withholding differ by person.

Rankings

Rankings use every detailed occupation BLS publishes, filtered as each ranking states (for example, at least 10,000 US jobs, or a typical entry education below a bachelor's degree). Residual "all other" categories and occupations without a published median are left out. State rankings require at least 500 jobs in the state (200 in states with fewer than 500,000 jobs) so that small, noisy estimates do not top the lists. Ties keep BLS order.

Updates

BLS publishes new OEWS estimates each spring, projections each September, and BEA updates price parities each December. We rebuild the data when each release comes out and update the year in page titles with each new OEWS release. Guides are rechecked against their sources at least once a year. See sources for release dates and why salary sites disagree for how this data differs from salary websites.