Finding Median Wage by Occupation and Location

An attorney asks which number you used, and why

A carrier's attorney is cross-examining your labor market survey. He pulls up your report, points to the wage-earning-capacity line, and asks a simple question: is that the national median wage for the occupation, or the wage in the claimant's actual labor market? If you can't answer cleanly — with a source and a geography attached — the number is vulnerable, and so is the rest of your opinion. This happens more often than it should, because it's easy to grab a national figure from a quick search and drop it into a report without checking whether it reflects the metro area, or even the state, where your claimant actually lives and works.

Median wage for an occupation is not one number. It's a number tied to a specific place, a specific reference period, and a specific data source. A rehabilitation counselor pulling a Standard Occupational Classification wage for a labor market survey or a wage-earning-capacity calculation has to get the geography right before the wage means anything to a carrier, an attorney, or a court. By the end of this article, you'll know where to find occupation-specific wage data at the geographic level that matches your claimant's real labor market, and how to document the source so it holds up when someone asks.

Why national median wage is usually the wrong number

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics collects occupational wage data through its Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program. OEWS estimates are built from a probability sample of about 1.1 million establishments, drawn in semiannual panels of roughly 186,000 to 189,000 each. That sample supports wage estimates at multiple geographic levels: national, state, metropolitan and nonmetropolitan area, and in some cases smaller areas within a state.

The national median wage for an occupation is an average across every one of those sampled establishments, everywhere in the country. It smooths together high-cost metro labor markets and rural counties, union shops and non-union shops, dense employer clusters and thin ones. For a vocational opinion tied to one claimant in one place, the national figure is rarely the right anchor — it's a starting reference point, not the number that belongs in a report about what someone can actually earn where they actually live.

This matters directly in a wage-earning-capacity analysis, where the whole exercise is comparing a pre-injury earning capacity against a realistic post-injury earning capacity in the claimant's own labor market. Using a national median when a metro-area or state figure is available and more appropriate can overstate or understate that capacity — and either error is the kind an opposing expert will find.

Finding wage data at the metro area level

OEWS publishes wage data for Metropolitan Statistical Areas and Metropolitan Divisions, which is the geographic layer most vocational reports should be working from when the claimant lives in or near a metro area. This is a meaningfully different number than the state median, and often quite different from the national one — labor markets vary by local cost of living, industry concentration, and employer density in ways that state-level or national averages don't capture.

The practical challenge is that metro-area OEWS tables are organized by area name and code, not by ZIP code or county name in a way that's always intuitive. If your claimant lives just outside a metro boundary, or in a nonmetropolitan area, you'll need the corresponding nonmetropolitan wage table instead — and that distinction needs to be documented, not assumed. We cover the mechanics of pulling and reading these tables, including how to match a residential address to the correct metro or nonmetro area, in our guide to metro area wage data in OEWS.

Getting the occupation code right before you look up a wage

None of this works if you're looking up the wrong occupation to begin with. OEWS wage tables are organized by Standard Occupational Classification code, and a SOC code lookup has to start from the actual duties of the job — the transferable-skills work — not from the job title on a resume or an old pay stub. Two job titles that sound identical can map to different SOC codes depending on supervisory duties, licensure, or industry, and two very different-sounding titles can share a code.

Get the SOC code wrong and every downstream wage figure is wrong too, no matter how carefully you handled the geography. If you're not confident in the code, work through how to look up a SOC code by job title before you pull a single wage figure. The crosswalk between DOT-era job titles (still common in older vocational files) and current O*NET-SOC codes is its own skill, and it's worth getting right before the wage lookup, not after.

Reading the OEWS wage table correctly

Once you have the right SOC code and the right geography, the OEWS table itself gives you more than a single median. Each occupation-and-area combination typically reports the mean wage, the median (50th percentile), and wages at the 10th, 25th, 75th, and 90th percentiles. That spread matters for a vocational opinion — a claimant with limited transferable skills and no advanced credential in a given occupation is rarely a 90th-percentile earner in that field, and a report that quietly assumes the median without acknowledging the plausible range invites the same cross-examination question about entry-level versus experienced wages.

We walk through pulling and interpreting the full OEWS table, including how the "by SOC code" search structure works on the BLS site, in our companion piece on BLS OEWS wage data by SOC code. That article covers the mechanics; this one is about making sure the geography attached to the number is the right one for your claimant.

Documenting the source so it survives scrutiny

A wage figure without a citation is an assertion. A wage figure with a citation — program name, geographic level, reference period, and a note on how the occupation code was determined — is evidence. At minimum, a defensible citation for a wage figure used in a vocational report should include:

• The data source (BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program)
• The geographic level used (national, state, or the specific Metropolitan Statistical Area/Metropolitan Division, or nonmetropolitan area)
• The SOC code and title, and a brief note on how it was matched to the claimant's occupation
• The reference period for the estimate

BLS updates OEWS estimates on a rolling schedule, and the reference period in effect changes over time — confirm the current release date and period directly on the BLS OEWS pages before citing a specific year in a report, rather than assuming last year's figure is still the latest one published.

A wage figure without a documented source is an opinion. The same figure, with a program name, a geographic level, and a reference period attached, is evidence a carrier or a court can actually evaluate.

This same discipline — matching geography, occupation code, and reference period — is the backbone of a proper labor market survey, not just a single wage lookup. If you're building or reviewing a full survey rather than pulling one figure, see our overview of labor market surveys in vocational rehabilitation for how wage data fits into the broader document.

Putting the wage figure into a wage-earning-capacity calculation

Finding the right median wage at the right geography is only step one. The number then has to feed into a wage-earning-capacity comparison — pre-injury earning capacity against post-injury earning capacity, adjusted for the claimant's residual transferable skills and the realistic labor market available to them. That calculation has its own methodology and its own pitfalls, which we cover separately in our explainer on wage-earning-capacity analysis.

Getting the wage lookup right is the input; getting the calculation right is what turns that input into a defensible opinion. Rules about how earning capacity is defined and applied are jurisdiction-specific — a workers' compensation board in one state may define post-injury earning capacity differently than a Social Security disability standard or an LTD policy in another, so confirm the applicable standard with the relevant authority before finalizing a report.

Building this into your workflow

Doing this lookup manually, occupation by occupation and claimant by claimant, is workable for one file. It gets slow and error-prone across a caseload of twenty or thirty claimants, each with a different location and occupation, especially when someone has to re-derive the SOC code and re-pull the geography every time a case comes up for reporting.

If you want a structured way to run the wage-earning-capacity math — pre-injury wage, post-injury wage, the residual capacity comparison, with the source citation built into the worksheet — download the Wage-Earning-Capacity Calculator Workbook. It's built to hold the geography, the SOC code, and the reference period alongside the calculation itself, so the documentation travels with the number instead of getting lost between the lookup and the finished report.