Sources & methodology

Everything on SalaryRow comes from public federal statistics. Nothing is self-reported, crowdsourced, or estimated by us beyond the arithmetic described below.

Datasets

Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS)U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics · May 2025

Every wage figure on the site: employment, mean, and the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentile annual wages for about 830 detailed occupations, nationally and by state.

Employment ProjectionsU.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics · 2024–34

Projected employment change, annual openings, and the typical education, experience and training needed to enter an occupation. These projections are produced at the national level only — BLS does not publish state projections.

Regional Price ParitiesU.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis · 2024

The cost-of-living index used to convert nominal wages into what they actually buy locally. 100 is the national average.

How to read the numbers

• Percentiles beat averages. A median says what the middle worker earns. The 10th-to-90th percentile range says what the field actually pays, and it is usually far wider than people expect.
• Suppressed cells are omitted, not guessed. BLS withholds estimates where too few employers report, to protect confidentiality. Where an occupation is missing for a state, no estimate was published — we do not interpolate one.
• $239,200+ means top-coded. OEWS does not publish wages above this threshold; occupations at the ceiling are shown with a plus sign rather than a precise figure.
• Cost-of-living adjustment is a per-place constant. Dividing every occupation in one state by the same price parity cannot change their order — so we show it as context on state pages, and re-rank by it only when comparing one occupation across states, where it genuinely matters.
• Wages and growth have different geography. Wage data goes down to states and metros. Growth projections are national only.

Attribution

Works of the U.S. federal government are in the public domain. BLS asks that its materials be credited, which we do above and in the footer of every page. SalaryRow is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or approved by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, or any other government agency. All rankings, derived metrics, and cost-of-living adjustments are our own calculations from the published data.