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US careers

Where the figures for us careers come from, how they were collected, and what checking every source link found. Used on /us/careers and every list, quiz result, comparison and PDF built from them.

Last updated October 31, 2026.

How the figures were collected

Each US career is built the same way as a Canadian one: five chapters, quick facts, a source list and a checked date, with US sources throughout.

  • Pay. The Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey (May 2025), read from My Next Move and O*NET OnLine, two US Department of Labor sites that publish the same figures for each occupation code and allow automated reading. bls.gov itself refuses scripted visitors, so the site never fetches or links it. The card shows the survey's 10th percentile, median and 90th percentile as a yearly figure.
  • Training, licensing and costs. The state licensing board or national exam body (NCEES (National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying), FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority), the state nursing board), the school's own program and tuition pages, and the federal program page for government careers (USAJOBS, the federal jobs site, and the pay scales of OPM (the Office of Personnel Management)). Where licensing differs by state, the card names the state it describes.
  • Occupation codes come from the O*NET database. Matching a career title to a code was checked by hand, because O*NET's alternate titles map some trades onto the wrong occupation.
  • Residual categories. Where the survey has no code for a career (the armed forces), the card says so instead of showing a figure. Where a career only falls under an "all other" code, such as "financial specialists, all other", the card either shows no figure or shows the figure for that wider group and says it is for the wider group, not the career alone.

In numbers

Pages with sources454
Citations3,455
Distinct source links2,392
Sites cited914

Pay figures re-read from the source

On October 22, 2026 a script opened the wage page every career cites and compared the card's median and range with the page, allowing 5% for rounding (Canada: hourly wage times 2,080 hours).

Card matches the wage page408
Pay comes from a published pay grid or scale, cited on the card, not the wage survey27
Self-employed career: no wage survey, income from the studies cited on the card18
Pay comes from a commercial pay-data estimate (Salary.com), because the field is too small for the wage survey; the card says so1

Every link, checked

Checked October 31, 2026: one request per link, as "ClaudeBot (research for career.help)", robots.txt honoured, no retries. A site that refuses automated visitors is recorded as refused, not retried under another name.

Reachable2,009
Moved (redirects)71
Refused automated check272
Not reachable40

The full result for this part, one line per link, is in the downloadable spreadsheet: check-2026-10-31.csv (all parts, with the page that cites each link in the inventory file beside it).

Links that did not answer or refused (312)

Each with the page that cites it. "Refused" means the site blocks our link checker; the figure was read when it was collected, from the page itself or from a dated archived copy, and a person opening it in a browser is noted where that happened. "Not reachable" links are being replaced or removed.

Every site cited (914)

Most cited first: every site with three or more links, and the first two hundred in any case. The rest are sites cited once or twice (a regulator's page, one school's calendar); every one of their links is on the page that cites it and in the spreadsheet above. 714 such sites are not listed here.

Back to sources and methods

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