How we compile salary and career data
We publish one honest page per occupation from U.S. federal public-domain data — BLS wage statistics and BLS education/training facts — rendered verbatim, with the data period labelled and BLS suppression flags kept intact. This page explains how, and what we deliberately do not do.
Who’s behind this site
Salary by Occupation is an independent publisher operated by VentureCorp, Inc. We are not an employer, a recruiter, a government agency or a salary-negotiation service, and we do not accept payment to change a figure. We answer one question accurately: what does the BLS report a given occupation earns nationally, and what does it typically take to enter it? This is not career, salary-negotiation or financial advice.
Where our data comes from
| Data | Source | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| National wages (median, mean, 10th–90th percentile, employment) | U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2024 national — U.S. federal public-domain data | Every per-occupation salary page and the by-group comparison |
| Education, experience & training to enter an occupation | U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Projections — education & training by occupation (2024 National Employment Matrix) — public-domain, joined on soc_code | The 'how to become' and outlook pages |
Wages are rendered verbatim from the BLS release for May 2024, with the period labelled on every page (wage data ages). BLS suppression flags are preserved: a wage at or above the BLS cap shows as ≥ $239,200/yr and unpublished figures as “not released” — we never substitute a fabricated number. Percentiles are a wage distribution, a proxy for experience, not a years-of-experience table.
How we calculate
We take the BLS OEWS national file (May 2024) and keep the 831 detailed occupations as the per-occupation spine and the 22 SOC major groups as the comparison clusters; each detailed occupation rolls up to its major group by the first two digits of its SOC code. We left-join the BLS Employment Projections education/training matrix on the SOC code for the 'how to become' and outlook facts. No wage is computed or adjusted — every figure is the BLS value as published. We re-pull annually when the new May file lands.
What we deliberately leave out. We do not publish a BLS projected growth percentage (it is out of scope for this dataset), so our 'outlook' pages describe the education/experience requirements and current scale of a field, never a fabricated growth rate. We give no salary-negotiation, career or financial advice, and we name no resume or career-service brands — any such links would come from a clearly disclosed, approved partner, never from the data.
Independence & how we make money
Some links on this site may be affiliate links to resume or career-service partners; if you act on one we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Partners never see or influence the wage figures or facts we publish, and no placement is for sale.
Keeping it current
BLS releases the May national wage file each spring; we re-pull and re-verify against it annually, and re-check the education/training matrix when BLS updates it. Each page carries its data period (May 2024) and verification date; current verification: June 2026.
Corrections
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