About SalaryInStates
SalaryInStates exists to answer one question well: what does a job pay, here? Career advice sites often quote a single national number with no source, or recycle figures from job-board scrapes that mix postings, duplicates, and stale listings. We take a different approach. Every wage, employment count, and percentile on this site is drawn from one authoritative public source — the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — and we show our source and its date on every data page so you can check any figure yourself in a few clicks.
Our Editorial Team
The SalaryInStates Editorial Team is a small group of researchers and writers who work with public labor-market data every day. Our backgrounds span workforce development, compensation analysis, and data journalism. Team members select which occupations and states to cover, design the comparisons you see on each page (premiums versus national medians, state rankings, pay spreads), and review every page before publication. We write for readers making real decisions — students choosing a field, workers weighing a job offer or a move, and employers sanity-checking their pay bands — so we favor plain language, show the underlying numbers, and avoid hype. When a figure could mislead, such as a mean pulled up by a small number of very high earners, we say so on the page and point you to the median instead.
How we source and check our numbers
All wage and employment figures come from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2024 release, published at bls.gov/oes. OEWS is a federal survey of about 1.1 million establishments, conducted with state workforce agencies, and it is the standard source U.S. employers, researchers, and journalists use for occupation-level pay. Our checks before publication: figures are taken only from published OEWS values (mean and median wages, employment, and percentile wages) and are never averaged together across sources or blended with other surveys; cells that BLS suppresses for quality or confidentiality reasons are omitted rather than estimated; wages at the BLS reporting cap are shown as $239,200+ (or $115.00+ hourly) exactly as the source presents them; and a sample of figures from every page type is cross-checked against BLS's own published summary tables. Figures on this site were checked in October 2026 against the May 2024 release.
Two limitations are worth knowing. First, OEWS describes wages at a point in time — May 2024 — so current offers may run a few percent higher. Second, state figures average together big metros and rural areas; a state median is a benchmark, not a promise about any particular city or employer. We flag both points in the disclaimer shown on every data page.
What we do not do
We do not sell salary data, run job listings, accept payment to feature an occupation or employer, or adjust a figure because it makes a page more dramatic. We do not publish estimates for cells BLS chose not to release, and we do not mix wage surveys from different years into a single number. If you spot a figure that looks wrong, please tell us through the contact page — corrections are made promptly and noted on the page.
Questions about the site or its data? Visit the contact page.