Methodology

How every number here is computed

Every figure on this site traces to an official government dataset or a state board document. This page explains what we use, how we process it, and what we refuse to publish.

Salary data

Wages come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program: the May 2025 release, plus May 2022 through 2024 files for trends. We report medians and percentiles exactly as BLS publishes them, by occupation (SOC code) and state or metro area. We never blend, estimate, or "adjust" wages. Where BLS suppresses a value (small samples), we show nothing rather than a guess.

• Percentiles describe all workers in the occupation and area, not entry-level offers.
• Trend percentages compare medians across OEWS vintages for the same occupation and area.
• State ranks cover the fifty states. The District of Columbia is not in the wage tables we publish, so it never appears in a rank or a range.

Job outlook

Growth rates and annual openings come from BLS Employment Projections 2024–2034, occupation-level table. These are national projections; states can differ.

Licensing requirements

There is no national database of trade licensing. We compile requirements state by state from official sources only: state licensing boards, statutes, and administrative rules. Each record stores its source URLs and a last-verified date, shown on the page. Records whose sources were ambiguous get independently re-verified before publication, and we re-check every state twice a year. Requirements change, so always confirm with the state board linked on each page.

School and program data

Training-program data comes from the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard (June 2026 release): net price, completion rates, median graduate earnings, and median debt. Program-level matching uses the federal CIP to SOC crosswalk. "Best value" style callouts are computations such as earnings-to-debt ratio, with the formula stated next to the claim. They are never editorial opinion.

What we refuse to publish

• Pages whose data doesn't meet minimum thresholds (they're consolidated instead).
• Earnings promises. BLS reports what workers earn; nobody can promise what you will earn.
• Estimates presented as facts, or numbers without a source and date.

Updates

OEWS refreshes annually (spring); Scorecard about twice a year; licensing records are re-verified twice a year. Every page shows its data vintage. When a page is regenerated with new data, its change note says so.