Data Sources

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the OES survey annually. It covers ~1,400 occupations (by SOC code) across every US metro (MSA) and non-metro area, with percentile wages (p10, p25, p50/median, p75, p90) and annual/hourly mean.

WageAPI loads the latest OES vintage (May 2024 release) and re-normalises it against canonical SOC titles. Every salary endpoint that returns US data ultimately reads from OES.

Methodology caveat: OES excludes self-employed workers and farm labour, and smaller metros may have sample sizes below 50 for niche occupations — we flag these with sample_size in the response so you can gate on statistical reliability.

The US Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes Regional Price Parities — index values that quantify how expensive each metro is relative to the national average (100 = US mean). RPP is released annually with a ~1-year lag.

WageAPI uses RPP as the cost-of-living adjustment layer on /v1/salary/compare and /v1/salary-adjusted. When you ask *what's a software engineer in Austin really worth in Seattle terms?*, the math is salary_austin * (RPP_seattle / RPP_austin).

RPP is published for all items, rents, goods, and other services — we use the all-items index by default.

The O*NET program (USDOL/ETA) publishes the canonical SOC occupation taxonomy plus rich metadata — alternate titles, task lists, required skills, work context. WageAPI uses O*NET purely for the fuzzy job-title lookup (/v1/jobs/search) and to map free-text titles to the correct SOC code for salary queries.

This application incorporates information from O*NET Web Services by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA). O*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA.

The /v1/salary/eu family (deprecated — prefer the unified /v1/salary with an ISO country code) uses Eurostat's Structure of Earnings Survey (SES) for the 27 EU member states plus the UK, Norway, Switzerland, and Iceland. Where Eurostat coverage is thin we fall back to national sources: Destatis (Germany), INSEE (France), ONS (UK), Statistics Netherlands (CBS), Statistics Sweden (SCB).

EU data is published less frequently than US OES — the SES runs on a 4-year cadence (latest: 2022 wave). In non-survey years we apply a deterministic inflation adjustment from the Eurostat Labour Cost Index.

The /v1/compliance/* endpoints implement rules from EU Directive 2023/970 on pay transparency and the gender pay gap. The directive mandates job-posting salary ranges, 5% maximum unexplained pay gap before joint assessment, and reporting cadence that depends on company size (250+, 150+, 100+).

Transposition is per-member-state and still in progress — see /v1/compliance/requirements/{country} for the live status of each national transposition law. None of this constitutes legal advice; always consult a qualified employment lawyer for your specific situation.

All data is EU-hosted on Hetzner Falkenstein. No PII is logged, GDPR compliant, no warranty — see the footer for the full legal boilerplate.