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US salaries by occupation and area

Bureau of Labor Statistics wage estimates for 830 occupations in 585 areas, with O*NET job attributes and a lookup from every ZIP area to its wage area.

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Coverage: OEWS May 2025: 393 metropolitan areas, 137 nonmetropolitan areas, the 50 states and the District of Columbia, 3 territories and the nation. Wages are published at area level, and the ZIP lookup assigns each ZIP area the wages of its area.

Why pay for public data

The wage files, the area definitions, the ZIP crosswalk and O*NET all come from different agencies with different keys. This joins them for $299 a year and says plainly which numbers are area-level.

How it is built

  1. 1

    Pull the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics release for May 2025, by area and by industry.

  2. 2

    Join area definitions, a lookup from 33,772 ZIP areas to wage areas, and O*NET 31.0 occupation attributes.

  3. 3

    Rebuild each year. No ZIP-level wage is modeled or invented. Wages that BLS top-codes stay empty and flagged.

What is in each record

FieldNotes
OCC_CODE, OCC_TITLE, OCC_LEVELStandard Occupational Classification
AREA_CODE, AREA_NAME, AREA_TYPE, STATEMetro, nonmetro, state, territory or nation
EMPLOYMENT, EMPLOYMENT_RSE, JOBS_PER_1000, LOCATION_QUOTIENTRSE is the relative standard error
HOURLY_MEAN, ANNUAL_MEAN, WAGE_RSE
HOURLY_P10 to HOURLY_P90, ANNUAL_P10 to ANNUAL_P9010th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentiles
TOP_CODED, TOP_CODED_FIELDS
OEWS_INDUSTRY_WAGESNational wages by NAICS_CODE and OWNERSHIP: 176,006 rows
OCCUPATIONSJOB_ZONE and TYPICAL_EDUCATION for each occupation. JOB_ZONE runs 2 to 5, because O*NET 31.0 merged zones 1 and 2
ONET_ATTRIBUTES, ONET_TECHNOLOGY_SKILLS, ONET_ALTERNATE_TITLESSkills, knowledge, abilities, work activities, tools and job titles
ZCTA_OEWS_AREAZCTA to AREA_CODE, with ASSIGNMENT_METHOD and PCT_OF_ZCTA_LAND_IN_AREA

Who uses it

  • Compensation and HR analytics teams
  • Job boards and recruiting tools
  • Workforce and economic-development researchers

Pricing

$299 a year.

No personal contact data is collected or sold in any QuestionPunk dataset.

Questions

Is this data not free from the government?
Yes. The source files are public and we link to them. You pay for the cleaning, the joins, the documented schema and the refresh, not for the data itself.
How is it delivered?
As Parquet or CSV files, by download link or to your own cloud bucket. The same tables load into Snowflake with the scripts we include. A Snowflake Marketplace listing is being set up and is not live yet.
Can I see the data before paying?
Yes. Ask for a sample and we send the Vermont and national rows, plus the full data dictionary.
Can I use it to track wages over time?
BLS discourages comparing OEWS releases over time, because methods and area definitions change. Treat each release as a snapshot. OEWS also leaves out the self-employed.
What is the license?
The wage data is US government work in the public domain. The O*NET tables are CC BY 4.0. This page includes information from the O*NET 31.0 Database by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA). Used under the CC BY 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). O*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA. QuestionPunk has modified all or some of this information. USDOL/ETA has not approved, endorsed, or tested these modifications.

Tell us what you need

Geography, size and fields. A two-line email is enough, and a person replies.

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