About
Salary information shouldn't be a black box.
WageByState exists for one reason: most people negotiate their pay without ever seeing the official median for their profession in their state. We're fixing that — one BLS-verified data page at a time.
What we do
WageByState is a free public-data project that takes the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) — the same dataset used by economists, policymakers and the federal government — and turns it into something an actual human can use. Median pay, top-paying cities, experience-tier breakdowns, take-home calculators that account for state tax. Every profession, every state, every page sourced from public data.
The BLS publishes this data every year. It's free. It's the most authoritative source there is. But it lives in dense statistical tables that almost no one outside professional economists ever opens. We pull it apart, run regional adjustments for the current year, and present it on pages that take 30 seconds to read instead of 30 minutes to interpret.
Why we built it
The pay gap between two neighbouring states for the same job is roughly $11,400 a year on average. That's life-changing money — the difference between renting and owning, between paying off student loans in 5 years or 15. Yet most workers walk into a salary negotiation, or accept a relocation offer, or take a job in a new state, without ever checking what the role actually pays in that location.
That information asymmetry isn't accidental. Employers have access to compensation data through paid services (PayScale, Mercer, Robert Half). Workers mostly don't. We think that's the wrong way round, so we built the most comprehensive public-data alternative we could.
Our principles
Real data, not guesses
Every figure is sourced from BLS OEWS data. No scraped job postings, no anonymous user-submitted "salary surveys" that can be gamed.
Free, always
The data is funded by your taxes. Re-presenting it should be free too. The site is supported by display ads and optional sponsorships, never paywalls.
Methodology in the open
We publish exactly how we calculate every figure on our methodology page. No black-box adjustments.
Workers first
We're built for the person trying to figure out what to ask for, not for the HR department trying to benchmark below market.
Who's behind it
WageByState is operated by a small independent team that thinks public salary data should be useful, not buried. We're not affiliated with the BLS, the US Department of Labor, or any government agency — we're just people who looked at the existing options (paywalled databases, employer-funded "research", forum threads from 2014) and decided there should be something better.
How it's funded
The site is free to use and is supported by display advertising and a small number of carefully selected sponsorships. We don't sell visitor data, we don't have paywalls, and we don't take payment to inflate or suppress any salary figure. If you'd like to advertise, see our sponsorship options.
Get in touch
Questions, data corrections, partnership ideas, or just want to say hello? Head to our contact page — we read every email.
Find your number.
Pick your profession. Pick your state. See what the data actually says.
Browse all 49 professions →