How to tell if you are underpaid, using real government wage data

An average can be pulled up by a handful of very high earners, so it rarely tells you where you personally stand. A percentile does. If the median, the 50th percentile, for your job is a certain number, half of workers earn less and half earn more. If you sit at the 25th percentile, three out of four people in your role are out-earning you. That is a far more honest picture than a single headline number.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes exactly this, for free, through its Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program. The May 2025 estimates, released on May 15, 2026, cover roughly 830 occupations and more than 155 million wage and salary workers, with five wage points for each: the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentile.

Here is what those five numbers look like for three common occupations in the May 2025 release, alongside the mean, which is a different and less useful figure for benchmarking yourself.

Figures are national, annual, and rounded to the nearest ten dollars. For context, the median wage across all US occupations in the same release was about $50,980, and the mean was $69,770.

Reading the five numbers correctly takes about ten minutes and works for any occupation covered by the survey.

Be precise here, because this is where people misread their own situation. BLS OEWS wages are base pay plus incentive pay and cost of living allowances. They exclude overtime premiums, most bonuses, and the annualized value of stock. That is why a software developer base of $135,980 at the median looks lower than the total compensation numbers you see on sites that add equity and bonuses on top. Both can be correct, they are simply measuring different things. When you benchmark, always compare base to base.

If you are below the median for your role and metro, you have three honest levers available: ask for a raise with the data in hand, change employers, since job switchers have historically captured larger raises than people who stay, or add a skill or credential that moves you toward the 75th percentile band. If you are already near the 90th percentile, further gains tend to come from scope and seniority rather than from matching the market, because at that point you effectively are the market.

None of this requires guesswork or a paid data subscription. The federal numbers are public, updated every spring, and are the most defensible salary benchmark you can bring into any conversation, including the one covered in our guide to negotiating with real numbers.

Every figure above traces back to the same federal release, cross-checked against O*NET OnLine, which republishes the full percentile tables from the same data.