State occupational wages (BLS)
BLS's own state-by-state release of the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey, so every state and the nation can be compared on the same basis.
Publisher
- Organization
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
- Publisher’s dataset
- Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics
- File or API used
- https://www.bls.gov/oes/special-requests/oesm<YY>st.zip
- Retrieval script
scripts/fetch-bls-oews.py- Methodology
- https://www.bls.gov/oes/oes_ques.htm
Coverage
- Geography
- Every state, the District of Columbia, and the United States
- Time coverage
- 2015-2025
- Update frequency
- Annual
- Published
- May 15, 2026
- Retrieved
- September 9, 2026
- License of the records
- Public domain. U.S. federal government work.
- Rows
- 2,860 observations, 2015-2025
Measures
| Measure | What it measures | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| Occupational employment, all occupations | Estimated total employment across all occupations, rounded to the nearest 10, excluding the self-employed. | people |
| Mean annual wage, all occupations | Mean annual wage across all occupations. | usd |
| Median annual wage, all occupations | Median (50th percentile) annual wage across all occupations. | usd |
| Median annual wage by major occupation group | Median annual wage for each of the 22 major Standard Occupational Classification groups, most recent year only. | usd |
Caveats
- Wages cover wage and salary workers only; the self-employed are excluded.
- Annual wages for occupations typically paid by the hour are calculated as the hourly wage times 2,080 hours, not a measured annual figure.
- Reference period is May of the estimate year, not a full-year average.
- BLS states that OEWS estimates are not designed to measure employment or wage change from one year to the next, since the three-year rotating sample and estimation methods can shift between years.
- A median wage above BLS's top-coded level prints as # in the source and is omitted here, never stored as the ceiling value.
- A blank, *, or ** cell means BLS suppressed the estimate for sample size or reliability; the observation is omitted, never stored as zero.
Pages built on this dataset
How to cite
Understand Idaho, “Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics”, compiled from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics. Retrieved September 9, 2026. https://understandidaho.com/data/bls-oews/.
Cite U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics directly for the figures themselves.
This page was last updated .