How to Read These Salary Figures

What the survey measures

The Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics programme surveys employers, not workers, twice a year, and pools three years of responses to produce estimates for about 830 detailed occupations. Because it asks establishments rather than individuals, it captures what employers pay rather than what people report earning, which is the main reason its figures sit below the numbers on salary-sharing sites.

Wages counted in these figures:

• Base rate of pay
• Cost-of-living allowances
• Guaranteed pay and hazard pay
• Incentive pay including commissions and production bonuses
• Tips, and on-call pay

Excluded, and their absence changes the picture in some fields:

• Employer contributions to benefits, insurance and retirement
• Non-production bonuses, which in finance and sales can exceed base pay
• Overtime premium pay
• Back pay, jury duty pay, severance and tuition reimbursement
• The self-employed, who are not surveyed at all

What the percentiles mean

A percentile is a position in the pay range, not a career stage. The 25th percentile is the salary below which a quarter of people in that occupation are paid; it is not the same as "what you earn after two years", though the two often look similar. Someone experienced in a low-paying region can sit at the 25th percentile for a whole career.

The median and the mean answer different questions and the gap between them is informative on its own. Where the mean sits well above the median, the occupation has a long upper tail: a minority earn far more than the typical worker. Where the two are close, pay is tightly clustered and the median is a reliable expectation.

The terms on these pages

Median wage

The wage of the worker in the middle: half of people in the occupation earn more and half earn less. It is the best single answer to what a job typically pays, because unlike the mean it is not moved by a small number of very high earners.

Mean wage

The arithmetic average of all wages in the occupation. It sits above the median in most occupations, because pay distributions have a long upper tail and no matching lower one.

Percentile

A position in the pay range. The 25th percentile is the wage below which a quarter of workers in that occupation are paid. It is a position, not a career stage, though the two often look alike.

OEWSOEWS

The Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics programme, a twice-yearly US federal survey of employers that produces wage and employment estimates for around 830 occupations. It was known as OES until 2021.

SOC codeSOC

The Standard Occupational Classification code, a six-digit federal identifier for an occupation, written as two digits, a hyphen and four more. Registered Nurses are 29-1141. It is what makes two data sources about the same job genuinely comparable.

Suppressed estimate

A figure the survey declines to publish because the sample behind it was too small to be reliable. Pages show these as "Not published" rather than guessing or leaving the cell blank, because an empty cell reads as a broken page.

Detailed occupation

The most specific level of the classification, as opposed to the broad and major groups that roll several occupations together. Every occupation page on this site is a detailed occupation, so no figure here is an average of averages.

Four ways these numbers get misread

• Treating the median as a starting salary. It is the midpoint of everyone doing the job, including people thirty years in. The 10th percentile is the closer figure for someone entering the field.
• Comparing states without adjusting for cost of living. This site publishes neither an adjustment nor a ranking of states overall, because the unadjusted comparison is misleading often enough to be worth refusing.
• Reading a suppressed estimate as a zero. Where a page says "Not published", the survey withheld that figure because its sample was too thin to stand behind. It does not mean the job pays nothing, and it does not mean nobody does it.
• Assuming an annual figure is the hourly rate times 2,080. It is not, and this site never computes one from the other. The survey publishes both separately, and in occupations with substantial part-time or seasonal work they do not reconcile.

Common questions

How current is this data?

The May 2025 release, which is the most recent available. The survey pools three years of employer responses and wages are adjusted to the reference period, so the figures describe the year rather than a single month. A new release lands roughly annually and this site is regenerated from it.

Why are these salaries lower than what I see elsewhere?

Salary-sharing sites collect self-reported figures from people who choose to submit them, which skews toward higher earners in larger companies and metro areas. This survey asks employers for what they actually pay across all establishments including small and rural ones, and it excludes bonuses that are not production-linked.

Does this data include remote work?

Workers are assigned to the location of the establishment that employs them, not where they physically work. For fully remote roles that means the pay is attributed to the employer's state, which is a growing distortion in state-level figures for office occupations.