Ask three friends what your job should pay and you’ll get three guesses. Ask a salary website and you’ll get a number built from whatever visitors chose to type in. But there’s a better answer, and it’s free: the federal government surveys employers across the country and publishes what roughly 830 different occupations actually pay — nationally, by state, and by metro area.

That dataset is the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program, or OEWS, run by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you’re weighing a job offer, preparing for a raise conversation, or wondering whether your paycheck has quietly fallen behind the market, it’s the first place to look. Here’s how to use it — and how to read the numbers so they work for you instead of against you.

Where these numbers come from

Unlike salary sites that rely on self-reported figures, OEWS estimates come from data employers themselves provide about the jobs on their payrolls and what those jobs pay. Because the numbers come from employer records rather than memory or wishful thinking, they’re about as close to ground truth as public wage data gets.

The estimates are updated once a year. As of this spring, the most recent set covers May 2024 — so treat the figures as a slightly conservative baseline. If wages in your field have been rising, the real market number today is likely a bit higher than what you’ll see on the screen. That actually works in your favor in a negotiation: you can say, honestly, “this is what the government measured, and it’s over a year old.”

How to look up your job in five minutes

Start at the OEWS profiles tool on the BLS website. You pick one of three starting points: an occupation, an industry, or a geographic area. For a personal paycheck check, do this:

First, search for your occupation by name. If your exact title isn’t there, that’s normal — the government groups jobs by what people actually do, not what the business card says. An “office coordinator” is probably under “secretaries and administrative assistants”; a “customer success associate” is likely “customer service representatives.” Read the short occupation description to confirm the match.

Second, choose your area. National numbers are interesting; your metro area’s numbers are the ones that matter. The tool covers states, metropolitan areas, and even nonmetropolitan regions, so a bookkeeper in rural Ohio isn’t stuck comparing herself to Manhattan.

Third, look at the wage table — and don’t stop at the first number you see.

Read the median, not just the average

Every occupation profile shows a mean (average) wage and a set of percentiles. The average gets skewed upward by a small number of very high earners, so the median — the 50th percentile, the point where half of workers earn more and half earn less — is usually the more honest benchmark for a typical worker.

Take registered nurses, one of the largest occupations in the country. In the May 2024 data, the average annual wage for RNs was $98,430, but the median was $93,600 — and the spread was wide: the lowest-paid tenth of nurses earned under $66,030 while the highest-paid tenth earned more than $135,320, according to BLS figures. Nearly a $70,000 gap, in the same occupation, driven by geography, experience, industry, and shift.

That’s the real lesson of the percentile table. If you have ten years of experience and specialized skills, the median isn’t your number — the 75th percentile might be. If you’re two years in, the 25th percentile tells you whether an offer is genuinely low or just junior.

Your metro area changes everything

The same job can pay very differently depending on where you stand when you do it. Pull up your occupation nationally, then pull it up for your metro area, and compare. If your local median runs well above the national figure, a job posting quoting the national “average salary” is lowballing you. If your area runs below, a remote role paying national-market rates is worth more than it looks.

This is also the cleanest way to sanity-check a move. Before you accept a transfer or chase a job in another city, look up the occupation in both metros. A raise that doesn’t clear the wage gap between two areas — let alone the cost-of-living gap — isn’t really a raise.

What the data can’t tell you

Be fair to the tool by knowing its limits. OEWS covers wage and salary workers, so if you’re self-employed, your market rate isn’t in here. The figures are wages only — no health insurance, retirement match, bonus, or equity — and benefits can easily be a quarter or more of total compensation. And because estimates are published annually, a field where pay is moving fast will be ahead of the printed number.

For a second opinion, the Labor Department–sponsored CareerOneStop salary finder repackages the same government data in a simpler search box, which is handy on a phone.

Turning the number into money

Once you have the local median and percentiles for your occupation, use them quietly and specifically. In a review, “market data for our metro shows the median for this role is $X, and I’m producing above-median work” lands better than “I found a bigger number online.” In a job offer, the percentile spread tells you how much room the employer likely has: an offer below the 25th percentile for your area has room to move almost by definition.

And even if you’re not negotiating anything this year, check your occupation once a year when the new estimates come out. Raises tend to go to people who know the number before they walk into the room. The data is public, it’s free, and your employer’s HR department has almost certainly already read it. You should too.

This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.