Methodology
Exactly where our numbers come from, how we calculate take-home pay, and where the model ends. No vague claims, no hidden assumptions.
Why we publish our method
Most salary sites show you a number and ask you to trust it. We think that's backwards. A salary figure is only as useful as your ability to judge how it was built — the source survey, the year it was collected, what's included, and what's quietly left out. This page exists so that a job-seeker, a relocation researcher, or a journalist can audit any number on this site and decide for themselves how much weight to give it.
Authoritative Source
Every salary figure traces back to the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey — the same dataset the U.S. government uses for labor-market policy.
Reproducible Math
Take-home pay is computed from published 2024 federal/state tax brackets, Social Security, and Medicare rules. No black-box estimates — every input is documented on this page.
Stated Freshness
BLS releases OEWS annually with a 1–2 year collection lag. We republish on each release and surface the survey year on every page so you never read stale numbers as current.
Open Limitations
We name what the model cannot do: it ignores 401(k) contributions, dependents, local city taxes, and non-wage compensation. Estimates are decision aids, not payroll.
1. Salary data source
Every base salary figure (median, mean, 25th and 75th percentiles, hourly rate) on LocalSalaryHub is sourced directly from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program. OEWS surveys roughly 1.2 million establishments over a three-year rolling window to produce wage estimates by occupation and metropolitan/nonmetropolitan area. We do not modify, model, or “adjust” these wage figures — we restructure them into city-level pages and surface the underlying percentiles.
Each salary page shows the occupation's Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) code, and our occupation-level pages link to the canonical BLS OEWS table so you can verify any number against the primary source in one click.
2. How we calculate take-home pay
The take-home pay calculator on each salary page converts a gross annual salary into an estimated after-tax monthly income. The model is deterministic and uses these inputs:
- Federal income tax — applied using the standard deduction and the 2024 federal tax brackets for a single filer.
- State income tax — the marginal state rate for the state where the city is located. States with no income tax (e.g., Texas, Florida, Washington) correctly return zero state tax.
- Social Security tax — 6.2% of wages up to the annual wage base ($168,600 for 2024).
- Medicare tax — 1.45% on all earned wages, plus the 0.9% additional Medicare tax above the high-earner threshold.
The result is then divided by 12 to produce a monthly figure, and adjusted by the local cost-of-living index (below) to show real purchasing power in that city.
3. Cost-of-living adjustment
To make salaries comparable across cities, we apply a living index derived from BLS Regional Price Parities (RPP) and Census Bureau cost estimates. The index is anchored to 100 as the U.S. national average; a city at 115 is 15% more expensive than average, so a $100,000 salary there is shown as worth roughly $87,000 in real purchasing power. This is why two cities with identical nominal salaries can produce very different “what will my life look like” outcomes.
4. Update cadence and freshness
BLS releases a new OEWS dataset once per year, typically in the spring, covering wages collected during a survey window that ends roughly 18 months earlier. When a new release publishes, we re-run our full pipeline and update every city and occupation page. Each page surfaces the last_updated field so the survey vintage is never hidden. We never silently refresh numbers — when the underlying BLS year changes, the date on the page changes with it.
5. What this model cannot do
We are upfront about the boundaries, because an estimate you trust too much is worse than no estimate at all. The take-home pay model does not account for:
- Pre-tax contributions (401(k), HSA, FSA) or post-tax deductions
- Dependents, filing status other than single, or joint-income households
- Local city/municipal taxes (e.g., NYC resident tax) — only state-level tax is modeled
- Bonuses, equity, commissions, or other non-wage compensation
- Tax credits (EITC, child tax credit, education credits)
Treat our take-home figures as a directional guide for comparing cities and occupations, not as a substitute for a CPA or a payroll department. The gap between our estimate and your real paycheck can easily be ±5–10% depending on your individual situation.
6. How to cite this data
If you're a journalist, researcher, or student using our figures, cite both us and the upstream BLS source. A reasonable form:
LocalSalaryHub (2026). [Occupation] salary in [City, State]. Retrieved from https://localsalaryhub.com/[page]. Underlying data: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), [survey year].
7. Independence from BLS
LocalSalaryHub is an independent project. We are not a U.S. government agency, we are not affiliated with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and we do not speak for them. BLS provides the raw public-domain data; every interpretation, calculation, and presentation on this site is our own. For authoritative government labor statistics, go directly to bls.gov.
Questions or corrections?
If you find a calculation error, a mislabeled occupation, or a city whose numbers look off, we want to know. Write to [email protected] and we will investigate against the BLS source. Corrections that trace back to a pipeline bug are fixed and redeployed, not silently patched.