Methodology & data source
HowMuchSalary exists to answer one question honestly: what do people in a given job actually earn in the United States? Every number on this site comes from official government data, shown exactly as published.
Where the data comes from
All wage and employment figures come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2024. The OEWS program is run by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and produces employment and wage estimates for roughly 800 occupations, based on a survey of about 1.1 million business establishments across the country.
We use the national estimates from the May 2024 release, published by the BLS. You can view the original dataset on the BLS OEWS page.
How we present it
- Figures are shown as published by the BLS. We do not round, adjust, or estimate wage numbers ourselves.
- For each job we show the median (50th percentile), the 10th, 25th, 75th, and 90th percentiles, the mean, and total U.S. employment, in both annual and hourly terms where the BLS publishes them.
- The median is the midpoint: half of workers in a job earn more and half earn less. It is a more honest single number than the average, which a small group of very high earners can pull upward.
- Some very high wages are top-coded by the BLS. When a figure is at or above $239,200 a year (or $115.00 an hour), the BLS does not publish an exact number, and we show it as that threshold with a plus sign.
- A few jobs, such as airline pilots and flight attendants, are salaried and have no published hourly wage. We label those as salaried rather than inventing an hourly figure.
- Where we mention the typical education needed to enter a job, that assignment comes from the BLS Employment Projections program (Education and training assignments by detailed occupation), not from our own judgment.
What this is not
These are national averages. Your own pay depends on your experience, location, employer, industry, certifications, and hours. Use these numbers as a solid reference point, not a promise. The figures reflect wages as of May 2024 and are updated when the BLS publishes a new release.
Scope
We track 762 detailed occupations, effectively every specific job the BLS OEWS program reports nationally. We leave out only the catch-all "all other" residual categories, which lump unrelated jobs together and are not useful to look up. Occupations are organized into fields such as healthcare, construction and the trades, technology, business and finance, and transportation.