There's a moment in every job search where you Google "[job title] salary [city]" and get a number. Maybe it's from Glassdoor. Maybe Salary.com. Maybe Indeed.
The number looks reasonable. You move on.
But here's the thing nobody tells you: that number is probably wrong, and even if it's right, it's useless without context.
The problem with salary data in 2026
Most salary websites get their numbers from one of two places: self-reported surveys or job posting extracts.
Self-reported surveys work like this: someone visits Glassdoor, creates an account, and types in what they earn. There's no verification. No pay stub. No W-2. The sample skews toward tech workers (who are overrepresented on Glassdoor), people unhappy with their pay (who are motivated to report), and anyone who felt like filling out a form that particular Tuesday afternoon.
For popular roles in big cities, the sample might be decent. For a dental hygienist in Boise? You might be looking at 12 self-reported data points. That's not a salary estimate. That's a dinner party anecdote.
Job posting data is better in some ways — it comes from actual listings — but it has its own problems. Listings often show ranges so wide they're meaningless ($60K-$120K), many don't include salary at all, and the posted number isn't necessarily what people are actually earning.
What the government already knows
Here's what most people don't realize: the U.S. government already has the best salary data in the country, and it's free.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics runs something called the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program. Every year, they survey over 1.2 million employer establishments — not individuals volunteering their salary, but employers reporting what they actually pay their workers. The sample covers every state, every major metro area, and over 800 occupations.
The data includes percentiles, not just averages. So instead of "nurses make $81K," you get: the 10th percentile earns $61K, the 25th earns $68K, the median is $81K, the 75th earns $93K, and the 90th earns $115K. That range tells you something an average never can — what entry-level pay looks like, what experienced pay looks like, and where most people actually fall.
It's published as public domain data. No license fees. No API keys. No paywall. It's yours.
So why doesn't everyone use it?
Because BLS.gov is a government website that looks like it was designed in 2003, because it was designed in 2003.
The data lives in enormous Excel files buried three clicks deep in a navigation menu that hasn't been updated since the Obama administration. There's no search. There's no comparison tool. There's no way to ask "what does this salary mean after rent and taxes in Dallas?" You get raw numbers in a spreadsheet and you're on your own.
That's the gap we built AffordMap to fill.
What AffordMap does differently
We download the same BLS data, load it into a database, and present it on pages designed for the way people actually search. "Nurse salary Dallas" gets you a page with the median, the full percentile spread, a chart, and — this is the part nobody else does — what that salary actually buys you in Dallas.
We pull in HUD Fair Market Rents to show what a 2-bedroom apartment costs. We use BLS Regional Price Parities to adjust for local prices. We calculate estimated take-home pay using actual federal and state tax brackets (not a flat "multiply by 0.72" guess).
The result is a page that answers the real question behind every salary search: not "what's the number?" but "can I actually live on this?"
What we don't do
We don't have proprietary data. We don't run our own salary surveys. The wage numbers on AffordMap are the same numbers on BLS.gov — we just make them usable.
The tax estimates, affordability calculations, and purchasing power adjustments are ours. They're estimates based on simplified models. They're not perfect. We say so on every page, and our disclaimer explains exactly what comes from the government and what we calculate.
We also don't gate basic lookups behind a login. You shouldn't need to create an account to find out what electricians make in Houston. That information is public. It should stay accessible.
The data sources
For anyone who cares about methodology (journalists, researchers, the curious), here's exactly where every number comes from:
- Salary percentiles: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OES), published annually based on employer surveys
- Rent: HUD Fair Market Rents, representing the 40th percentile of gross rents for standard quality units
- Cost of living: BLS Regional Price Parities via the Bureau of Economic Analysis, measuring relative price levels across metro areas
- Tax estimates: IRS published brackets + state tax schedules, calculated with progressive bracket math (not flat effective rates)
- Company-level salaries: Department of Labor H-1B disclosure data, which includes actual wage offers from visa-sponsoring employers
All of it is public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105. We cite BLS as the source on every page.
What's next
We're launching with the top 50 occupations across 50 major metros — about 2,500 pages. Over the next few months, we'll expand to the full 800+ occupations and 400+ metros in the BLS dataset. That's over 300,000 salary pages, each with affordability context that doesn't exist anywhere else.
If you find a wrong number, email corrections@affordmap.com. We take data accuracy seriously because the whole value proposition falls apart if the numbers are wrong.
If you're a career blogger or journalist and want to embed our salary data on your site, we have a free widget that takes one line of code and auto-updates quarterly.
And if you just want to know what your salary is actually worth in your city — that's what the homepage is for.
AffordMap is free. We make money through advertising and affiliate links to job boards and education programs. These never influence the salary data, which comes directly from government sources. Full disclosure.