Enter your wage and see what share of workers you out-earn — nationally, and in every state. Built on the Bureau of Labor Statistics' wage survey of 155 million U.S. jobs, all occupations combined.
Longer bar = more pay. This is the fastest way to see the gap.
Each state is colored by your rank there — the darker the green, the closer your pay sits to the top of that state's earners. The same wage ranks very differently depending on where you earn it. Tap a state for its full picture.
Each rung is a pay level for the area shown. Find “You are here,” then look at the next rung up: that is the raise that moves you up a step.
Pick a target and see the yearly pay it takes in the state you've selected on the map. Top 10% is the Bureau of Labor Statistics' published 90th-percentile wage; Top 5% and Top 1% are modeled estimates from the same tail fit used above.
To compare what the target takes in every state at once, sort the ranked list below by “Pay needed.”
Ranked by where your pay lands in each state, best first — “Top 10%” means only that share of the state's workers earn more than you. The list and the map always move together — drag the slider and watch both reshuffle.
Median shown is each state's median wage for the group in the calculator — all occupations combined, or the occupation you picked. Ranks are estimated between the Bureau of Labor Statistics' published 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentile wages; ranks inside the top 10% are modeled estimates.
Tap a job to run the calculator on that occupation's pay in every state — real state-level tables (Source: BLS OEWS May 2025 via WageDex). The national result for a job is pooled from its state tables, and any state whose wage figures BLS suppressed is labeled wherever the national figures stand in for it.
Close, and labeled honestly. Between the Bureau of Labor Statistics' published pay levels (10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, 90th), your rank is a straight-line estimate. Inside the top 10%, where BLS publishes nothing higher, it's a modeled estimate and says “est.” wherever it appears.
Because typical pay differs by state. Your rank compares you with workers in that state only — $52,000 beats more workers in Mississippi than in Massachusetts, because the middle wage is lower there.
Not always. Rank is not buying power. Turn on “Adjust for cost of living” above the map and the same pay is re-ranked by what it actually buys in each state — and check the “Left over / mo” figure in any state's panel for what's left after basic costs.
Wages are the Bureau of Labor Statistics OEWS survey, May 2025 — BLS publishes new wage data once a year. State-by-state wages for individual occupations come from the same OEWS May 2025 release, via WageDex's state tables. Metro-area wages for those occupations come from the same release's metro file, so a metro area's ranking compares you with workers in that occupation in that metro area. Prices are BEA Regional Price Parities 2024, typical earnings and rent are Census ACS 2024, basic costs are the MIT Living Wage Calculator, and gas is AAA's state average from November 1, 2026.
Wage data is the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 release — all occupations combined, covering about 155.5 million jobs. BLS publishes the wage at the 10th, 25th, 50th (median), 75th, and 90th percentiles for the U.S. and every state; your rank between those points is a straight-line estimate. Above the 90th percentile BLS publishes nothing further, so ranks inside the top 10% are estimated with a power-law (Pareto) tail fitted to each distribution's own 75th-to-90th-percentile step — the standard shape for the top end of a wage distribution. That yields single-digit estimates (top 5%, top 2%, top 1%) instead of a flat “top 10%,” but they are model estimates, not published figures.
Annual pay assumes full-time work at 2,080 hours a year (40 × 52), the same convention BLS uses. A percentile is a rank, not purchasing power: it doesn't adjust for what things cost in each state, so a wage can rank high somewhere and still not go further there.
Cost-of-living view. The “Adjust for cost of living” toggle converts your wage into buying power in each state: adjusted wage = your wage × 100 ÷ the state's price level, then ranks that adjusted wage against the state's actual wage distribution. Price levels are the Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional Price Parities (2024), all items, where the U.S. average is 100 — California is 110.7, Arkansas 86.9. The adjusted rank is a buying-power lens on the same BLS wage data, not a different BLS percentile.
The bare-bones basics. Typical rent is the median gross rent from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) 2024, 5-year estimates. Rent and goods price levels are BEA Regional Price Parities for housing rents and for goods (indexes, U.S. = 100 — they compare prices, they aren't dollar bills). Food, housing, and transportation costs and the living-wage rate are from the MIT Living Wage Calculator, for one adult with no children. Gas is AAA's state average for regular unleaded, a snapshot from November 1, 2026 — it moves daily, so treat it as that day's price. “Left over” is gross monthly pay (before tax) minus MIT's food, housing, and transportation costs only: a bare-bones yardstick, not a personal budget.
Going below the state level. Metro and small-city areas on the map are Census Bureau metropolitan and micropolitan areas (2024 definitions). County and ZIP-area figures are ACS 2024 typical earnings — the median earnings of a worker and the median household income there. They are labeled as typical earnings because BLS does not publish pay rankings by county, ZIP, tract, or neighborhood, and this page does not pretend otherwise. ZIP codes are matched to Census ZIP Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTAs). Metro areas have their own wage tables too: for the six occupations in occupation mode, each metropolitan area's card and dot use that metro's own BLS OEWS May 2025 distribution (same release's metro file, 393 metropolitan areas) — the ranking inside a metro's top 10% is a modeled estimate, labeled “est.”, exactly as at state level. Micropolitan (small-city) areas are not in the BLS metro file, and the all-occupations view has no metro tables, so those fall back to the statewide ranking and say so. A county-level colored map is future scope.
Occupations. Occupation mode uses the BLS OEWS May 2025 state-level wage tables for a starter set of jobs — each state's own mean, median, and 10th, 25th, 75th, and 90th percentile wages for that occupation. Source: BLS OEWS May 2025 via WageDex (state file: 36,168 occupation–state rows; underlying BLS figures are public domain, the WageDex compilation is CC BY 4.0, attributed to WageDex and BLS). The national result for a job is recalculated from those state tables: each national percentile is read off the employment-weighted pool of the state distributions, and the national mean is the employment-weighted average of the state means — so it can differ slightly from BLS's separately published national figures, which are computed from the full survey microdata. Where BLS suppressed a state's wage cells (too few employers reporting — for example Software Developers in Alaska, where only employment was published), that state falls back to the pooled national distribution and is labeled as suppressed wherever that happens. In occupation mode, metro-area dots and cards use the metro's own wage table for the job when BLS published one; where BLS suppressed a metro area's wage cells for the job (17 metro–occupation combinations in this file), that area falls back to the statewide figures and is labeled as suppressed. Counties remain a list of typical earnings (Census ACS), not a pay ranking.
Sources: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025; BEA Regional Price Parities, 2024; U.S. Census Bureau ACS 2024 5-year estimates; MIT Living Wage Calculator; AAA state gas price averages; state occupation wages from WageDex (BLS OEWS May 2025 via WageDex, CC BY 4.0); metro occupation wages from the BLS OEWS May 2025 metro file (MSA_M2025_dl.xlsx, 393 metropolitan areas; underlying BLS figures are public domain). Figures retrieved November 1, 2026.
Data as of November 1, 2026 — wages: BLS OEWS May 2025 · occupation wages by state: BLS OEWS May 2025 via WageDex · metro occupation wages: BLS OEWS May 2025 metro file · prices: BEA Regional Price Parities 2024 · typical earnings and rent: Census ACS 2024 · basic costs: MIT Living Wage Calculator · gas: AAA state average, Nov 1, 2026.