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SalaryBases publishes two very different kinds of number and keeps them apart. Official statistics appear in the wage tables, the pay rankings and the guides, always with their source, period and scope. Model-based estimates come only from the salary estimator on the home page and are labelled as estimates wherever they appear. This page explains both.
These figures are reproduced as published. We do not adjust, smooth, extrapolate or fill in values the agencies did not publish; a missing value is shown as "n/a". All of this data describes the United States only. The guides do not quote pay figures for other countries, because we have not built them on official sources we can cite.
What the OEWS wage figures include: base pay, cost-of-living allowances, guaranteed pay, hazardous-duty pay, commissions, production bonuses and tips. What they exclude: overtime, severance pay, shift differentials, nonproduction bonuses, employer benefit costs and tuition reimbursement. They cover wage and salary workers, not the self-employed, and the May 2025 estimates combine survey panels collected over three years. Source: BLS technical notes.
Guides are drafted with AI assistance and then edited. They have not been reviewed by a licensed financial, tax or legal professional, and each one says so. Pay tables in the guides are rendered directly from the data files listed above rather than typed in, and an automated check fails if any dollar figure written in a guide's text does not match a value in those files, unless the sentence marks it as an example.
Studies and statistics from other sources are cited with a link next to the claim they support. Guides that were general advice without data, sources or a clear connection to pay have been archived: they remain readable at their address but are excluded from search engines, the sitemap and the guide listing. Publication dates are not shown because we do not have reliable dates for the older guides; each dataset shows the date it was retrieved instead.
Each estimate starts from a profession base benchmark — a representative mid-career annual value in USD. This is then adjusted by a series of multiplicative factors:
The result is a single point estimate with a synthetic range (−20% / +25%). This is a transparent arithmetic model, not a statistical sample and not a machine-learning prediction trained on real payroll data.
Exception for US occupations with an official equivalent. For about a hundred US job titles that match one BLS occupation, the estimate starts from the BLS national median instead of a fixed benchmark, and only the city and experience factors are applied (5 years of experience equals the median). The industry, company-size, education, work-mode and skills factors are not used for these titles. The BLS percentiles are shown next to the result. We made this change after finding that, for some occupations, the fixed benchmarks and stacked factors produced estimates far above even the 90th percentile of official pay.
The net (take-home) figure applies an approximate flat effective tax rate per country. This is not a real progressive-bracket calculation, does not include social security, allowances, deductions, regional taxes, or family situation, and may be materially wrong for any specific individual.
The cost-of-living figure is a relative index converted to a monthly amount, not a priced basket of goods. Treat both as rough illustrations only.
Market demand, job-growth percentages, competition level and work-life balance in the estimator report are qualitative labels assigned by profession category, not values drawn from a labour-market dataset. Career projections apply a simple fixed annual-growth assumption (5%/yr to 5 years, 4%/yr to 10 years) — they are not a forecast.
Official datasets are updated when the agencies publish new releases; OEWS is published once a year. Estimator parameters may be revised over time; there is no automated real-time data feed. When a number looks wrong, trust the official source over the estimator.
To report an error, use the contact page.
For pay outside the United States, consult these statistical sources directly. They are not used by the estimator; they are listed so you can check real figures.