Published by Salary by Metro · Updated October 15, 2026

How the figures are made

Salary by Metro reports the May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics estimates from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, released May 15, 2026, for U.S. metropolitan areas. A page is one occupation in one area. The headline number is the median BLS published. The band under it is the percentile range from the same row.

Who publishes the site

Salary by Metro publishes this website. It is an independent reading of public statistics. It is not the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, or the Tax Foundation. Those agencies produce the wages, price parities, and tax schedules cited here. They do not operate salarybymetro.com.

The site does not ask for an account to read a wage. Corrections and questions go to hello@salarybymetro.com. What to include in a note.

Wages

The wage source is the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, released May 15, 2026. The news release is Occupational Employment and Wages, dated May 15, 2026. Survey methods, publication standards, and the list of what a wage includes are in the May 2025 technical notes.

OEWS wages are straight-time gross pay. They include base rates, cost-of-living allowances, guaranteed pay, hazardous-duty pay, incentive pay, and tips. They exclude overtime pay, shift differentials, nonproduction bonuses, and the employer's cost of benefits. Employment is a count of wage-and-salary jobs at establishments. The self-employed are not in it. A metro figure covers the metropolitan statistical area in the BLS title, including the surrounding counties, not the city limits of the first name in the title. The area definitions follow the Office of Management and Budget metropolitan statistical areas used for that release.

This release has 830 detailed occupations, 393 metropolitan areas, and 54 state and territory areas. Across all occupations, the national median annual wage is $50,980.

When a wage is not published

Two different gaps show up in the tables. If an occupation is not in a metro's May 2025 file, there is no page for that pair, and the address returns 404. If the occupation is in the file and BLS did not publish the median, the page still exists and says the wage is not available. Employment can still be shown. A blank is not stored as zero. The national median, the state median, and a wage from another metro are not written into the blank. When a wage is not published walks through the difference. Some occupations are published on an annual basis only, or on an hourly basis only. The page says which, and it does not turn an hourly wage into a yearly salary by multiplying by 2,080.

Regional price parities

Price comparisons use the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Regional Price Parities by state and metropolitan area, 2024, released February 19, 2026. The series is the all-items parity. The United States equals 100. A parity of 115 means BEA estimates prices in that area at 15 percent above the national level. The wage is divided by the parity and multiplied by 100 to express it in national prices. The same ratio, flipped, answers what salary in a second metro has the purchasing power of a salary in the first. The comparison page does both.

The parity year is 2024 and the wage year is May 2025. The pages name both years. A parity is a price level for the whole area, not a household budget. Where BEA did not publish a 2024 all-items parity, the page says so and does not invent one.

Nearby metros

A nearby metro is another metropolitan area in this OEWS release whose Census Bureau internal point is within 200 statute miles, and which has a published median for the same occupation on the same pay basis. The points are the U.S. Census Bureau, 2024 Gazetteer Files, Core Based Statistical Areas, internal points (INTPTLAT, INTPTLONG). The file is https://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/maps-data/data/gazetteer/2024_Gazetteer/2024_Gaz_cbsa_national.zip. Distance is the great-circle mileage between those internal points, using a mean Earth radius of 3,958.7613 miles. The page names the closest areas, the miles, and where the local median ranks inside that set. An area farther than 200 miles is not labeled nearby, and its wage is not used to fill a gap.

Take-home pay

The take-home figure is an estimate for tax year 2026. It starts from a yearly wage, subtracts the federal standard deduction, applies the federal rate schedule, then subtracts employee Social Security, employee Medicare, Additional Medicare Tax when the wage is over the threshold, and state income tax. Each piece is rounded to the nearest dollar. On a job page the starting wage is the published annual median, the filing status is single, and the state is the metro's primary state. The calculator changes those three. If BLS did not publish an annual wage, the calculator is not offered a yearly figure made up from an hourly rate.

Federal brackets and the standard deduction are from IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32, announced in the IRS news release on 2026 inflation adjustments. For 2026 the standard deduction is $16,100 for single filers and for married filing separately, $32,200 for married filing jointly, and $24,150 for head of household. Employee Social Security is 6.2% of wages up to the 2026 contribution and benefit base of $184,500. Employee Medicare is 1.45% with no wage base. Additional Medicare Tax is 0.9% above $200,000 for single filers and heads of household, above $250,000 for married filing jointly, and above $125,000 for married filing separately. How take-home pay is estimated records the same sources.

State brackets, standard deductions, and personal exemptions are the January 1, 2026 schedules compiled from state statutes, forms, and instructions by the Tax Foundation and published February 17, 2026. Minnesota's single and joint brackets were checked against the Minnesota Department of Revenue. States that do not tax wages are estimated at zero state income tax on the wage. For Arkansas, California, Idaho, Massachusetts, North Dakota, and Vermont, the January compilation still carried 2025 inflation-adjusted bracket widths, and the result says so. Utah's credit phaseout uses the 2025 income thresholds, and the result says that too. The estimate leaves out itemized deductions, dependents, pre-tax benefits, local income taxes, and state disability and paid-family-leave payroll taxes. It is not a tax return and it is not tax advice.

Which pages are indexed

An occupation-and-metro page is indexed when all of the following are true in the May 2025 tables. The median is published. Employment is at least 7,400. The metro is one of the 25 largest by all-occupations employment. The page can show a percentile spread (the 10th and 90th, or the 25th and 75th when the outer pair is not published), a comparison with the national median on the same pay basis, a price-adjusted wage from the 2024 parity, and at least one other metro within 200 miles with a published median for that occupation. In this release, 2,068 occupation-and-metro pages meet that bar. The other 138,947 occupation-and-metro pages stay on the site for anyone with the address, use noindex, and are left out of the sitemap.

The highest-paying-jobs page for a metro is indexed for those same 25 largest metros. Occupation pages, state pages, the comparison, the take-home calculator, the guides, and this page are indexed. Staff pages at /admin, /login, /dashboard, and /account are not: they send noindex, nofollow, they are disallowed in robots.txt, and they are not in the sitemap.

Update cadence

Wage pages change when BLS releases a new Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics set that replaces the May 2025 estimates. Until that release, the wage pages stay on the May 15, 2026 vintage, and the sitemap lastmod for those URLs is that release date. Regional price parities change when BEA releases a new year. The pages now use the 2024 parities, released February 19, 2026. The take-home estimate changes when the IRS publishes new federal schedules or when the state compilation used here is updated for a new tax year. The estimate on the site is tax year 2026. Each guide shows the date its text was updated. This page was updated October 15, 2026.

A short machine-readable summary of the same sources and hubs is at /llms.txt.