Methodology & data sources

Our data labels

Every salary figure on this site carries one of the labels below. We never present an estimate as official data.

BLS OEWS baseline

Our national engineering wages come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program — the most authoritative public source for U.S. occupational pay. We use median and percentile annual wages by Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) code.

Engineering is not one occupation. We track each discipline under its own SOC code — Civil (17-2051), Mechanical (17-2141), Electrical (17-2071), Aerospace (17-2011), and so on — plus Architectural and Engineering Managers (11-9041) and Software Developers (15-1252).

BLS OOH & O*NET

We use the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook for career context and job outlook, and the O*NET taxonomy to map emerging titles (AI engineer, data engineer, robotics engineer) to standard occupations.

Direct data vs mapped estimates

When BLS tracks a role by name, we show its figures as Verified. When a role is new or renamed — AI engineer, data engineer, machine learning engineer — BLS has no direct line item, so we map it to the nearest occupation (usually Software Developers) and label it a Mapped est.. We never imply BLS tracks these titles directly.

State & metro estimates

Until per-state and per-metro BLS OEWS files are imported, geographic figures are Estimate values: the national baseline multiplied by a cost-of-labor index informed by BLS regional wage levels and cost differences. These are clearly labeled estimates, and our import pipeline replaces them with direct BLS geographic wages as files are loaded.

User & employer submissions

Engineers can submit their salary. Individual submissions are private and moderated. They appear publicly only in aggregate, and only once a category reaches a minimum sample size. Employer-submitted ranges are labeled separately and never override BLS data.

Company salary gates

We do not publish company-level salary numbers without source and sample-size gates. Company pages are not part of our public salary product until verified data exists; they are excluded from search results and the sitemap, and carry no salary schema.

Sponsored content policy

Sponsorship and advertising never influence salary figures. Any sponsored employer profile or placement is clearly labeled. Salary answers always appear above commercial content.

What changes as the dataset grows

We label honestly today and upgrade labels only when the data earns it. Concretely:

• After per-state/metro BLS files import (run npm run import:oews): geographic Estimate figures become Verified where a direct OEWS wage exists.
• After enough community submissions: a role/location gains a Community figure shown alongside — never replacing — the BLS baseline, once it clears the sample-size threshold.
• After persistence is enabled (Supabase): submissions, leads, and employer inquiries are stored and moderated; until then the site runs in a read-only local/seed mode and submissions are previewed, not retained.
• Mapped estimates stay mapped unless BLS begins tracking the title directly. We will not relabel an estimate as Verified to look more authoritative.

How to improve the dataset

The fastest way to sharpen these numbers is real data: submit your salary (private, aggregated, moderated), and encourage peers to do the same so role and metro categories clear their sample-size gates. Employers can share verified ranges, labeled separately and never allowed to override BLS data.

What we do not claim

• We do not claim BLS tracks every engineering title directly.
• We do not present estimates as verified data.
• We do not publish unverified company salary numbers.
• We do not list example jobs as real, open positions.