Career One Stop Salary Finder: What a Career Pays Where You Live

Most people who open this tool want one number: what a job pays in the place you live or plan to live. The tool gives you that in one search. It sits on CareerOneStop, a public careers site paid for by the U.S. Department of Labor, and it pulls its figures from the federal government's own wage survey rather than from people typing their pay into a form.

What the Salary Finder shows you in one search

You enter a job title and a location. The CareerOneStop Salary Finder returns a small table with three pay levels, labeled low, median and high, shown both per hour and per year. Under your local row it adds the same three figures for your state and for the whole country, so you can see at a glance whether your area pays above or below the norm. A chart view shows more points along the range, and the site covers roughly 800 occupations, from home health aides to software developers.

That side-by-side view is the main thing the tool does well. A nurse in a small Midwestern city and a nurse in a coastal metro can be paid tens of thousands of dollars apart for the same job title. Seeing local, state and national figures stacked together tells you how much of a salary is the job and how much is the place.

CareerOneStop in a sentence: free, government-run, no account needed

CareerOneStop is the Department of Labor's free website for job seekers, students, workers changing fields and the counselors who help them. You do not sign up, pay or hand over an email address to use the Salary Finder. The same site holds other tools that pair well with it: an Interest Assessment, a Skills Matcher, occupation profiles with education and outlook data, and a scholarship finder for paying for training. Used together, they make a rough research path: find a field, check what it pays, check what it takes to get in.

1. Open the tool. Go to the Salary Finder page on CareerOneStop. No account is needed.
2. Enter the job. Type a job title, a keyword or an O*NET code in the occupation box.
3. Enter the place. Type a city, a state or a ZIP code, then press Search.
4. Read the table. Check low, median and high pay, switch between hourly and yearly, or open the chart view for more points on the range.

The search itself takes a minute. What shapes the numbers you get back is which occupation you pick and which area your location maps to, so those two choices get the most attention here.

Searching by job title, keyword or O*NET code

Open the Salary Finder and find the box labeled for an occupation. You can type a plain job title such as "registered nurse", a keyword such as "nursing", or an O*NET code, the federal occupation number you can look up on O*NET OnLine. A keyword usually returns a short list of matches. Pick the one whose description sounds closest to the work you have in mind, not just the one with the nicest title. Many jobs that look alike sit under different codes and pay very differently.

Next, type a location: a city, a whole state, or a ZIP code. Then press Search. To look up CareerOneStop wages by occupation for the whole country, use the national view, which the site offers as a link near the results. To compare salaries by location, run the same job again with a second place and set the two tables side by side, or open the chart view, which plots the pay range as a set of bars.

Last, look for the switch between hourly and yearly pay. Hourly is the better view for shift work and part-time jobs. Yearly is easier when you are comparing a career against an offer letter or a current salary.

Why your ZIP code shows a metro-area number instead

Type a ZIP code and you may notice the results are labeled with a wider area, such as a whole metro region. That is expected. The government survey behind the tool reports pay for metropolitan areas and for groups of rural counties, never for single towns or ZIP codes. Your ZIP is matched to the area that contains it, so a search for a suburb returns the figures for the whole metro.

This matters most in large regions where pay varies inside the metro. Downtown hospital pay and outer-suburb clinic pay end up in one number. Treat the local row as an area average and expect real offers in your corner of it to land above or below.

The results table is short, which makes it easy to misread. Each of its three figures has a precise meaning, and the yearly and hourly columns do not cover quite the same workers.

Low, median and high pay, explained with real numbers

The three columns are points in a ranking of everyone in that job and place:

• Low (10th percentile): one in ten workers earns less. Closest to a first-job wage.
• Median (50th percentile): the worker in the exact middle. Half earn more.
• High (90th percentile): only one in ten earns more. Senior or specialist pay.

The chart view adds the 25th and 75th percentiles in between.

Here is a real lookup: registered nurses in Columbus, Ohio, from the May 2025 OEWS data (yearly pay).

Row

Low

Median

High

Columbus, OH metro

$67,720

$83,900

$105,770

Ohio

$66,980

$82,510

$105,290

United States

$68,940

$97,550

$137,470

Read it one row at a time. The Columbus row is what the local market pays. A newly licensed nurse there should expect an offer near $67,720, and a nurse with a decade on a specialist unit can aim toward $105,770. The Ohio row sits just under Columbus at every level, so the city pays a small premium over the rest of the state, about $1,400 at the median. The national row is the surprise. The low end is close to Columbus, but the median is about $13,650 higher and the high end about $31,700 higher. That gap comes from high-paying states such as California pulling the national figures up. So a Columbus nurse who holds an offer against the national median will think it is low when it is in fact fair for the area. Always judge an offer against the local row first, and use the national row only to see how your area ranks.

The median marks the typical worker, not the starting salary and not the ceiling.

The median is also not the same as the average. A few top salaries can drag an average upward, yet they barely move the middle worker. That is why salary finder low, median and high figures are more useful than a single average: the gap between low and high tells you how much room there is to grow inside one job.

Hourly vs yearly pay and part-time workers

The hourly column counts everyone paid in the job, including people who only work some hours or some months. Yearly figures are for people on a full-time, year-round schedule, and they are worked out by multiplying the hourly rate by 2,080 hours. So a median of $46.90 an hour becomes about $97,550 a year. Planning on fewer than 40 hours a week? Start from the hourly rate and scale it to your own weekly schedule instead of trusting the yearly column. Jobs where most people work part-time, such as many retail and food service roles, look better on the yearly view than most workers will earn in a year.

Which pay counts in the salary figures and which does not

The figures are base pay plus a few kinds of pay tied to the work itself: commissions, tips, piece rates, hazard pay and production bonuses. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics wage survey FAQ, they leave out overtime, back pay, severance, shift differentials and nonproduction bonuses such as year-end and holiday bonuses. They also leave out benefits, such as health insurance and retirement contributions. In jobs where overtime or bonuses are a large share of take-home pay, such as some trades and sales roles, the Salary Finder will understate what people take home.

Almost anyone weighing a work decision can get something from a two-minute lookup. The tool helps most when you already have a job title in mind and need a fair range to hold it against.

Students picking a major or a training program

Look up the jobs a degree leads to, not the degree itself. Check the low figure as well as the median, because the low is closer to what a first job pays. Then compare it with what the program costs.

Career changers checking a new field

Run your current job and your target job in the same place. The gap between the two medians is a fair first guess at what a move gains or costs you. Not sure yet that you want to switch? A career change self-assessment comes before the pay check.

Job seekers weighing an offer or a raise

Using the CareerOneStop Salary Finder for job offer negotiation works best when you place the offer on the ladder. An offer under the median for your metro is worth questioning if you have more than a few years in the role. Bring the figure into the talk, and see our guides on how to ask for a pay raise and how to state salary expectations in a cover letter.

Counselors and advisers

The tool is free, needs no login and uses government data, which makes it easy to share with a client or a class. Pair it with the occupation profiles on the same site so the conversation covers training and job outlook as well as pay.

The Salary Finder is the best free baseline for U.S. pay, and it still has gaps. Knowing them keeps you from reading more into a figure than it holds.

What to do when the Salary Finder has no data for your area

Sometimes a search returns a blank row where the local figures should be. That usually means too few employers in that area reported the job for the survey to publish a reliable estimate, which is common for rare jobs and rural areas. Three fixes, in order: switch the location to your state, try a broader job title that covers the same work, or check the national row and adjust with what you know about local living costs.

Other free salary tools worth checking

The Salary Finder gives you the market baseline. Crowdsourced sites fill a different gap. Glassdoor collects pay that employees post about named companies, so it can show what one employer pays, though the sample is whoever chose to post. Payscale builds a range from people who fill in its survey and adjusts for years of experience and skills. Salary.com draws on pay surveys that employers buy, and shows ranges by title and city. How does CareerOneStop's accuracy stack up against them? For the market as a whole it is the most dependable of the four, because it comes from employer payrolls at a large scale. For one company, or for your exact level, the others add detail it lacks. Use the Salary Finder first, then check a named employer on a crowdsourced site.

Using Salary Finder data to pick a career that fits you

The pay table prices a job. It says nothing about whether you would be good at the work. That gap has a cost: if you pick a high median in a job that does not suit you and leave after two years, you start over at the low end of a new field and give up the raises the table assumed you would earn. So when you use the salary finder to choose a career, start from the jobs that fit you, then check what each one pays. Our list of the best career planning tools covers the free options for that first step.

For the fit side, try the Pigment career test. Its questions cover how you make decisions, how you deal with people, and how you like your work set up, none of which a pay table can see. Around 120 questions later, Pigment hands back 36 pages on how you operate, and one section of it lists specific roles matched to your profile. Bring that shortlist back here and price each role in your area. The report is a planning aid for you, built to narrow your own list of careers.

Shortlist Careers That Fit, Then Check the Pay

The Salary Finder puts a price on a job. Pigment points to the jobs that match how you operate, so you only price the ones worth chasing. $79.99.

See which careers suit you