How we rank jobs
Every ranking on this site is computed from published government data with the formula below. Nothing is editorial, nothing is paid placement, and every input is one you can check.
- Pay
- Median annual wage for the occupation in the ranking's geography. BLS OEWS.
- Growth
- Projected percent change in employment over the decade. BLS Employment Projections.
- Employment
- How many people hold the job in the geography today — a proxy for how established the path is. BLS OEWS.
- Openings
- Projected average annual openings, including replacement needs. BLS EP.
Each factor is scaled 0–1 against the strongest occupation on the list, weighted and summed into a composite. Because no occupation is the best at everything at once, the raw composite tops out well below 100, so the number we show is rebased to the list leader: the top-ranked occupation is set to 100 and the rest are proportional. A score of 80 means "80% of the leader's composite." This rescales presentation only — it never changes the ordering or the weights. Scores compare jobs within a list; an 80 in Texas and an 80 in Ohio are not the same claim.
Weights by list type
A worked example
Sources and update cadence
When data is missing
BLS suppresses estimates for small occupation-area cells to protect respondents. When a value we'd normally use isn't published:
- the cell shows a dash and a dagger (—†) with the reason — never a made-up number;
- the score is recomputed from the remaining factors, reweighted to sum to 1, and marked with the same dagger;
- for a metro whose local wage is suppressed, we fall back to the state median and label the fallback;
- growth and openings are national in this release — state projections aren't in the data pull, and we say so on every geographic page rather than guess.
Limits worth knowing
- OEWS is a survey of employers: it excludes the self-employed and reports straight-time wages — no overtime, no equity.
- Projections are decade-long trends, not guarantees; they miss shocks.
- "Best" is our weighting of the public numbers. It can't weigh what you value — the formula is here so you can disagree with it precisely.