What Is a Wage Percentile? How to Read BLS Pay Data Correctly

Every wage figure on this site is built from five numbers BLS calls the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentile. If you've only ever compared your salary to a single “average” on a self-reported site, this is the concept that makes those numbers actually useful for evaluating an offer.

What a percentile means

A percentile tells you where one value sits relative to everyone else in the group. If you earn at the 25th percentile for your occupation and metro, 75% of people in that same job and city earn more than you, and 25% earn less. The 50th percentile is the median — half the workers in that occupation and area earn more, half earn less. The 90th percentile marks the top of the range BLS publishes: only 10% of workers in that occupation and area earn more.

A single average collapses all of that into one number and throws away the shape of the distribution. Two occupations can share the same average pay while one has a tight, predictable range and the other spans a huge gap between entry-level and senior compensation — the percentile spread is the only way to tell them apart.

Where these numbers actually come from

The percentiles behind every figure on WageTruth come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey — a semiannual mail survey BLS sends to a rotating sample of roughly 200,000 U.S. establishments, covering about 1.1 million business locations over a three-year cycle. Employers report actual wages paid, by detailed occupation, directly to BLS. Nothing is self-submitted by workers, and nothing is estimated to fill a gap — the current release WageTruth serves is the May 2025 reference period, published May 2026.

Because the sample size varies by occupation and area, BLS suppresses a percentile figure entirely when it doesn't meet publication reliability standards, rather than publish an unreliable estimate. When that happens on this site, the tool says so explicitly and falls back to the next-broadest published geography (state, then national) — it never interpolates a number BLS didn't publish.

Why the median beats a plain average

A mean average is easily skewed by a small number of very high earners — a handful of senior or executive salaries can pull the average well above what a typical worker in that role actually makes. The median (50th percentile) isn't affected by outliers the same way, which is why BLS treats it as the headline “typical wage” figure for an occupation. When you're sizing up an offer, the median tells you what's typical; the 10th–90th spread tells you the realistic range you could eventually reach.

How this differs from a self-reported salary site

Glassdoor, Payscale, and Levels.fyi build their numbers from whoever chooses to submit a salary anonymously. There's no disclosed sample size, no way to verify a submission is accurate, and no percentile structure — most show a single average or a narrow, unlabeled range. OEWS data is the opposite on every count: a known sample of real employers, a published methodology, and a full percentile distribution with a stated reference period. That's the entire reason this site cites BLS and O*NET exclusively and never blends in a crowd-sourced figure.

Reading your own result

When you look up your occupation and metro, notice which percentile band your offer or current salary falls into, not just whether it's “above or below average.” An offer near the 25th percentile leaves more room to negotiate up toward the median than one already sitting at the 75th. And if you're comparing offers across cities, remember each city has its own published distribution — the same percentile can mean a very different dollar figure depending on the metro.

Informational only, not professional or financial advice.