Editorial Policy

Where numbers come from

Every figure on Career Atlas USA is either (a) published directly by an official U.S. government or federally funded source — the Bureau of Labor Statistics, O*NET, the Department of Education’s College Scorecard, NCES, or the Bureau of Economic Analysis — or (b) a calculation we perform on top of that data, clearly labeled as ours with the formula documented at /methodology. See /sources for the full list, and every page shows the specific release date of the data it’s built on.

What we never do

• Never use AI to generate a salary, statistic, or fact.
• Never scrape salary numbers from job boards or random websites.
• Never publish a fake review, fake rating, or fake school.
• Never accept payment to rank a school, career, or program more favorably.
• Never show a suppressed or missing value as zero — a missing number is always labeled “Not available,” never invented.

Updates

When a source agency publishes a new release, we import, validate, and publish it automatically — the previous data stays live until the new release passes validation, so the site never shows partially-imported or broken numbers.

Corrections

If a number looks wrong, it’s either an error in how we processed a real source, or the source itself changed. Report it via /contact with the page URL, and we’ll trace it back to the original release and correct it.