Updated May 2026 · BLS OEWS 2025
Is Your Salary Fair?
Enter your role, city, and current salary, and the calculator places you on the Bureau of Labor Statistics percentile distribution for your exact role and metro — the same federal data the U.S. Department of Labor uses to set H-1B prevailing wages.
How the Calculator Works
Select Your Role
Choose the job title that most closely matches your position. We map titles to BLS Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) codes, the federal taxonomy of jobs.
Pick Your City
Select your metro area for location-specific salary data. BLS publishes percentile wages by Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), reflecting real local labor market differences.
Enter Your Salary
See where you rank among workers in the same role and metro. Below the 25th percentile usually signals underpayment; above the 75th means you are at the top of the band.
What the Percentile Tells You
The percentile is a relative ranking, not an absolute score. A 50th-percentile salary means half of workers in your role and city earn more, half earn less — that is the median. The 25th percentile is the cutoff for the bottom quarter; the 75th percentile is the cutoff for the top quarter; the 90th percentile is where senior specialists, managers, and workers at the largest employers cluster.
The right percentile target depends on your experience and employer. As a rough guide: new entrants and early-career workers should expect to land near the 25th–40th percentile; mid-career workers with 5–10 years should target the 50th–75th; senior specialists should be benchmarking against the 75th–90th. If you are below those bands for your career stage, that is a signal worth investigating — see our am I underpaid? guide.
Cost of living matters when comparing across cities. A 50th-percentile salary in a high-COL coastal metro buys the same purchasing power as a 75th-percentile salary in a mid-cost Sun Belt city — the COL-adjusted salaries guide walks through the math.
How to Use the Result in Negotiation
The classic negotiation move is to anchor on the 75th percentile of the BLS band for your role and metro, then bring evidence (years of experience, certifications, comparable offers, scope of past work) to justify why you sit at that point in the distribution rather than the median. Anchoring on the median when you have meaningful experience leaves money on the table; anchoring on the 90th without evidence undercuts credibility.
For specific scripts and a full negotiation framework, see the data-driven salary negotiation guide. To compare your role across multiple metros, the role pages show full city-by-city percentile tables.
How This Calculator Is Built
The percentile lookup uses real BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics data — pulled from bls.gov/oes, processed into per-role-per-metro records, and surfaced via this calculator. The 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentile wages come directly from the BLS dataset; the calculator interpolates linearly between the published cuts to estimate your exact percentile. Where BLS does not publish a city-and-role combination (usually due to small sample size), the calculator falls back to the nearest match in our role catalog. Read the full methodology for details and limitations.
Calculator FAQ
What salary should I enter into the calculator?
Enter your total annual base salary before taxes and deductions. Do not include bonuses, equity, or other variable compensation unless you specifically want to compare total compensation. BLS percentile wages reflect base wages only, so an apples-to-apples comparison requires base-only input.
How are percentile bands calculated?
Percentile bands come directly from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program at bls.gov/oes. BLS publishes the 10th, 25th, 50th (median), 75th, and 90th percentile wage for each occupation in each metropolitan area, drawn from a survey of about 1.2 million U.S. employers. The calculator interpolates between these published cuts to place your salary in the distribution.
Why is my role-and-city combination not available?
BLS does not publish wage data for role-and-city combinations where the survey sample is too small to be statistically reliable, or where confidentiality rules would expose individual employers. If your exact combo is missing, try (a) a nearby city in the same metro area, (b) a closely related role in the same SOC code family, or (c) the national figure for your role.
Should I include bonus and equity in my salary?
Generally no — BLS OEWS measures base wages, so adding bonus/equity will overstate your percentile. The exception is tech roles where total compensation matters more than base; in those fields, cross-check against Levels.fyi for total comp ranges. For most occupations, base salary is the right input.
How accurate is this calculator?
The percentile bands are as accurate as the underlying BLS OEWS dataset, which is published once per year and is the same source the U.S. Department of Labor uses to set H-1B prevailing wages and federal contracting rates. The calculator does not adjust for years of experience, employer size, or specialized credentials — those factors will move your percentile within the band.
How current is the underlying data?
The current dataset is the 2025 BLS OEWS release, last refreshed May 2026. BLS publishes new OEWS data once per year, typically in spring for the prior survey year.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, 2025 release. Public domain. See bls.gov/oes. The same dataset is referenced by the DOL Foreign Labor Certification system for prevailing wage determinations.
Last refreshed 2026-05-21 · 65 roles · 70 metros · 4400 role-city pairs.