SalaryTruthBLS DATA

Editorial Policy

Last updated: June 2026

This page explains who is behind SalaryTruth, how our pages are produced, and the standards every page on salarytruth.org is held to. We publish it so readers, journalists, and search engines can judge our work by a clear, stated process rather than guesswork.

Who runs SalaryTruth

SalaryTruth is an independent publication built and maintained by the SalaryTruth Team. We are not funded, owned, or directed by any of the agencies, companies, or organizations that appear in our data. We do not accept paid placements, sponsored rankings, or fees to add, alter, or remove an entry. Our editorial judgment is not for sale.

How our content is produced

SalaryTruth covers U.S. occupation-level salary and wage data. Our pages are assembled programmatically from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program: we fetch the primary records, process them with documented, repeatable methods, and render them as pages a non-specialist can read. We pull the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) file for every national, state, and metro area, extract the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th wage percentiles for each SOC occupation, and surface employment counts alongside. No modeling or smoothing — the numbers are as BLS published them. Cost-of-living adjustments use a standard regional COL index to translate gross wages into national-baseline purchasing power for cross-metro comparisons.

We are transparent that this is a data-publishing operation, not a wire service of on-the-ground reporters. Where we add narrative, that narrative describes and interprets the underlying public data — it never invents facts the data does not contain. Automated assembly is reviewed against the source, and the methodology behind any score or ranking is documented and linkable.

Editorial standards

  • Primary source only. Every figure traces back to the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program, cited and linkable on the page where it appears.
  • No invented numbers. If a value is not in the underlying public data, it does not appear on salarytruth.org. We never generate synthetic statistics to fill gaps.
  • Documented methodology. Rankings, grades, and composite scores are editorial calculations derived from public data using stated, repeatable formulas — not certifications or endorsements.
  • Dated and refreshed. Refreshed twice a year, tracking the BLS OEWS release schedule (typically May and November reference periods). The DOL prevailing-wage cross-reference pages derive from the same BLS data, with updates flowing through automatically when the OEWS publication cycle completes.
  • Corrections welcome. When a reader or the source identifies an error, we fix it — see our Corrections Policy.

Verification and fact-checking

Because our numbers come straight from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program, our verification work is about faithful processing rather than re-reporting. The detail of how we check figures before publication is described in our Fact-Checking Policy.

Ownership and funding transparency

SalaryTruth is part of a small portfolio of independent public-data sites. The site is free to read and carries no display advertising. We do not sell personal data. Where an outbound link is an affiliate link, it is disclosed and never changes our editorial judgment.

Contact

Questions about how a page was produced, or about these standards? hello@salarytruth.org. See also our About page and our Corrections Policy.