1. Where Our Data Comes From
Every salary figure on Official Salary traces to one or more of the following authoritative government sources:
- ✓BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS)
The primary source for US occupational salary data, collected from 1.1 million employer establishments twice per year. We use OEWS for median, P25, P75, and P90 figures by metropolitan area.
- ✓BLS National Employment Matrix
Used to derive 10-year job growth projections and employment volume by occupation.
- ✓US Department of Labor H-1B Disclosure Data
Annual employer-reported wage disclosures from the Foreign Labor Certification program, providing a cross-check on specialty occupation pay.
- ✓Eurostat Structure of Earnings Survey (SES)
The European Union's official harmonised earnings dataset for 27 member states, used for EU country salary pages.
- ✓ILO ILOSTAT
The International Labour Organization's global wage database, used for salary pages in countries not covered by BLS or Eurostat.
We do not use crowdsourced salary surveys, self-reported compensation databases, or any single-company pay disclosures as primary sources. These sources introduce self-selection bias and survivorship bias that make them unsuitable for population-level estimates.
2. Update Cadence
Our data pipeline runs on a fixed monthly schedule:
BLS OEWS micro-data is ingested, validated, and merged into the salary database. City and occupation figures are refreshed.
Cross-source confidence scores are recalculated. Pages that fall below our quality threshold are flagged for human review.
BLS National Employment Matrix projections are updated to reflect the latest 10-year outlook cycle.
Our Quality Gate engine monitors every published page. Pages with stale data, low confidence, or thin content are automatically queued for re-scoring.
3. Human Review Process
No salary data on Official Salary is published, modified, or removed without a human decision. Our governance architecture enforces this:
- —Every automated action is logged in the Decision Ledger with a timestamp, confidence score, and reason.
- —Page expansion (adding new salary pages) requires approval from the Anti-Spam Governor, which enforces a weekly rate limit and minimum quality threshold.
- —AI systems on this platform do not generate salary estimates. All figures originate from official government datasets.
- —Salary figures that diverge more than 20% from the prior period are held for human inspection before publication.
4. Confidence Score
Every salary page displays a Confidence Score (0–100) calculated by our Confidence Engine v2. The score reflects:
A score below 60 triggers a "Low Confidence" warning on the page. A score below 40 suppresses the page from sitemap and search indexing until data quality improves.
5. Accuracy Commitment
We are committed to the following standards:
- ✓Salary figures are never inflated to attract traffic or improve click-through rates.
- ✓We display ranges (P25–P75) rather than single numbers to prevent misleading impressions.
- ✓Limitations and caveats are displayed on every page (experience level, sample size, regional variation).
- ✓Revenue considerations never influence editorial decisions. Advertisers do not influence salary data.
- ✓Errors reported by users are investigated within 5 business days and corrected with a change note if the report is substantiated.
6. Corrections Policy
If you believe a salary figure on Official Salary is incorrect, please contact us with the specific page URL, the figure you believe is wrong, and any supporting source. We will review the report against our primary data sources and publish a correction if warranted. Corrections are noted inline on the affected page.
Contact: hello@officialsalary.com
See also