Published by Salary by Metro · Updated October 12, 2026
When a wage is not published
Not available means BLS did not publish the estimate. It does not mean the wage is zero.
Some cells in the May 2025 occupational wage tables are suppressed. BLS withholds an estimate that does not meet its publication standards. The usual reasons are confidentiality, so a figure cannot be tied to a particular employer, and reliability, so a noisy estimate is not printed as if it were solid. The technical notes describe those standards. They are the reason a page says a wage is not available.
Three different blanks
The first blank is a missing row. If the occupation does not appear in the metro file, there is no page of wages to show. The address returns a not-found page. That is different from a row that exists with the wage withheld.
The second blank is a published row with the wage withheld. Employment may still be published. The page shows the employment and marks the median and the percentiles as not available. It does not substitute the national median, the state median, or a wage from a nearby metro. A filled-in number would look like a BLS estimate and would not be one.
The third blank is a wage that was never estimated on that basis. Elementary school teachers are the national example: the annual median is published and the hourly wage is not, because the occupation is not treated as hourly. That hourly cell is not a suppressed annual wage. The page explains the basis.
What not to do with a blank
- Do not read it as zero pay.
- Do not treat it as a wage above a particular dollar ceiling. This release publishes wages well above the old hourly and annual display limits used in earlier notes, so an unpublished cell is not a stand-in for a known top-code.
- Do not multiply a different percentile, or the national wage, to invent the missing one.
- Do use the next larger published geography, and name it. The state page and the national occupation page are the honest fallbacks.
A page with an unpublished median is still generated, so the employment count and the fact of suppression are visible. Search engines are asked not to index that page. A page with a published median for a well-populated occupation in a large metro is the one meant to be found.