Disclaimer
The wage, salary, and employment figures published on SalaryInStates.com are estimates from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2024 release. They describe the distribution of pay for occupations in states, metropolitan areas, and the nation at the time of the survey. They are averages and medians across thousands of employers — not the wage of any individual worker, and not a guaranteed, offered, or negotiable rate for any specific job.
Actual pay for a given role depends on the employer, city, experience, credentials, shift, and current labor-market conditions, and will differ from these survey figures, which also age as new data is released. Nothing on this site is career advice, legal advice, financial advice, or a recommendation to accept, reject, or negotiate any offer. Before acting on any figure here, check the primary source at bls.gov/oes and confirm the current range with the employer.
We work to keep figures accurate — every number is taken from published BLS values and spot-checked before publication — but we make no warranty that the site is free of error, and we accept no liability for decisions made in reliance on it. Where we find or are told of an error, we correct it and note the correction on the page.
How these estimates are produced
OEWS is a survey, not a census of paychecks. BLS and state workforce agencies collect wage reports from a sample of about 1.1 million establishments and weight the responses to represent all nonfarm wage and salary employment. Estimates are built from six semiannual survey panels collected over three years, with wages updated to the May 2024 reference period. Because the figures are estimates, they carry sampling error: a state median for a small occupation can move between releases even if no worker's pay changed. BLS suppresses some occupation-and-area cells where the sample is too small or an employer could be identified; those cells are simply absent from this site rather than estimated by us.
Medians, means, and percentiles
Most pages show both a median and a mean. The median is the middle wage — half of workers earn more, half earn less — and is usually the better guide to typical pay. The mean is an average that high earners pull upward, so in most occupations it sits above the median. Percentile figures (10th, 25th, 75th, 90th) describe the spread: for example, the 90th percentile is the wage that only the top tenth of workers in that occupation and area exceed. Annual figures are converted from hourly rates at 2,080 hours a year, the BLS convention; workers with part-time, seasonal, or unpaid-leave schedules will earn less in a year than the converted figure.
Top-coded wages and data vintage
For the highest-paid occupations, BLS caps published wages at $115.00 an hour and $239,200 a year; figures at the cap are shown on this site with a plus sign (for example, $239,200+) to show they mean "at or above" the cap. All figures on this site are from the May 2024 release, the most recent OEWS data checked by our team in October 2026. Pay in most occupations changes a few percent a year, so treat these numbers as a dated benchmark, not a live quote.