How we
calculate.
Sources
1. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025. A federal survey of employers. For each job in each metro and rural area, BLS publishes the 10th, 25th, 50th (median), 75th and 90th percentile annual wage. We use 851 occupations across 530 areas. bls.gov/oes
2. U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Foreign Labor Certification, LCA disclosure data, FY2026 Q3. When employers hire on H-1B and similar visas they must file the wage they’ll pay for each position. We keep certified, full-time filings (393,060 wages) out of 437,496 rows. Wage ranges: when an employer filed a range (“from” and “to”), we use the midpoint; if the top is more than twice the bottom we treat it as a likely error and use the bottom. Otherwise we use the single filed rate. Units: both ends are converted with the filed unit: yearly ×1, monthly ×12, bi-weekly ×26, weekly ×52, hourly ×2,080 (40 hours × 52 weeks); annualized wages outside $20,000–$1,500,000 are dropped. We merge employer name variants by federal employer ID. These are wages for visa-sponsored positions (mostly H-1B): base pay only, no bonus or equity, and they describe sponsored roles, not every employee. Each filing is attested by the employer under penalty of perjury. dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor
Experience filter (optional). Each DOL filing carries a prevailing-wage level, I to IV, that the employer assigns from the job’s required education, experience and duties. If you pick an experience band we map it to a level: 0–2 years → Level I, 3–5 → II, 6–9 → III, 10+ → IV. This mapping is approximate: the levels are defined by the job’s requirements, not the worker’s years, so a 4-year engineer may be filed at Level I or III. When you pick a band, your employer’s filings and the other-employer list use only that level. If fewer than 5 filings exist at that level (for your employer, or for an employer in the list), we fall back to all levels and say so. BLS survey figures have no experience split and always cover all experience levels. Your choice stays in your browser, like your salary.
Geography. Each filing is placed in an area using its worksite county and the official BLS OEWS May 2025 area definitions (county → metro or nonmetropolitan area), with the Census 2020 place/county-subdivision files as a fallback. So Redmond counts toward Seattle, and Menlo Park toward San Francisco. 99.9% of filings map to an area; the rest are mostly U.S. territories BLS doesn’t publish.
How your percentile is calculated
Market verdict: we place your pay among the five BLS percentile points for your job and metro, interpolating on a log scale between them. Below the 10th or above the 90th percentile we only say “more than 90%”, because BLS doesn’t publish finer detail. Very high wages are top-coded by BLS and shown as “top-coded”. If BLS has no figure for your metro we fall back to your state, then the U.S., and say so.
Employer verdict: if your employer reported 5+ salaries for your job, we rank your pay against those exact filings (your metro first, then state, then U.S.). Filings mix experience levels (DOL wage levels I–IV), and small groups (5–20 filings) are noisy, so treat a company verdict as a rough signal.
Target number (Dossier): the 75th percentile of your group, rounded to $1,000. If you’re already above it, the 90th. For job offers we suggest countering about 5% above the target.
How this differs from salary-sharing sites
Sites like Glassdoor, Levels.fyi and Payscale mostly collect salaries that people choose to post. That data is useful and often includes bonus and equity, but self-reported data can have selection bias. Outpaid uses only government sources: an employer survey (BLS) and wages employers filed with the Department of Labor. The trade-offs: base pay only, and BLS data lags about a year.
Privacy
All ranking happens in your browser. Your salary is never sent to our server, to analytics or to Stripe. The re-open link keeps it after the “#”, which browsers don’t transmit, and we strip it from analytics events. Share cards contain your percentile, employer and cohort, never your salary; if you choose to add your gap, it’s drawn on the image in your browser and never sent to us or put in the link. A percentile in a small group can still hint at your pay range, so share thoughtfully.
Limits
These are base wages, not bonus or equity. BLS figures are from May 2025 and lag current pay. Employer filings skew toward companies that hire on work visas. Data may contain errors. Not legal, financial or career advice.