About SalaryEngineer

What we do

We publish engineering wage benchmarks for the United States — by role, by state, and by metropolitan area. Where most salary sites blend anonymous, unverifiable self-reports into a single number, we start from the most authoritative wage survey in the country and show you exactly where every figure comes from. If a number is a directly-published government wage, we say so. If it is an estimate, a mapping, or a blend, we label it plainly and explain how it was derived.

The result is a reference you can bookmark, cite, and trust — whether you are negotiating an offer, planning a career move, benchmarking a team's pay, or writing about the engineering labor market.

Where our data comes from

Our core dataset is the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program — a survey of roughly 1.1 million establishments that produces the national, state, and metropolitan-area wage estimates the federal government itself relies on. We import the official May 2024 release and publish the figures unmodified.

Every wage on the site carries a provenance label. A national or geographic figure read directly from the source is a verified benchmark. A blended “all engineers” figure is an employment-weighted estimate built from those published numbers. An emerging title that the government does not track as its own occupation — an AI engineer, a DevOps engineer — is mapped to the nearest tracked occupation and labeled as a mapped estimate. Where the government withholds a figure for reliability or confidentiality reasons, we show nothing rather than invent one.

Read the full methodology for the exact sources, provenance labels, and derivations.

Editorial standards

• ▹Every figure is labeled. No salary number appears without a provenance label and a path back to its source.
• ▹We never fabricate data. Figures are imported from official releases; suppressed cells stay suppressed, and topcoded wages are shown as ranges, not exact numbers.
• ▹Estimates are called estimates. Anything modeled, mapped, or blended is labeled distinctly from a directly-sourced figure.
• ▹Trust comes before monetization. Salary answers always appear above any advertising or sponsored content, and figures are never influenced by advertisers.
• ▹We correct errors openly. When a new government release lands or we find a mistake, we update the figures and the “last updated” date.

Independence

SalaryEngineer is independently operated and not affiliated with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics or any government agency. We will monetize the site through clearly-labeled advertising and compensation-related services, but our wage figures come from official data and are never adjusted for commercial reasons. Salary figures are reference estimates, not offers or guarantees of pay.

Get in touch

Questions, corrections, data requests, or press inquiries are welcome — see our contact page. Engineers can also submit their own salary to help improve local coverage over time.