Career Atlas Opportunity Score
A 0–100 score for how strong the opportunity is for a given career in a given state, combining four percentile-ranked signals. It is a Career Atlas USA calculation, not an official government statistic.
The formula
| Component | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Cost-adjusted salary | 40% | Percentile rank, among all states, of median salary divided by that state’s BEA Regional Price Parity. |
| Jobs per 1,000 | 25% | Percentile rank of BLS employment-per-1,000-jobs for this occupation in the state. |
| Location quotient | 20% | Percentile rank of how concentrated this occupation is in the state, relative to the nation. |
| Employment availability | 15% | Percentile rank of ln(1 + total employment) in the state — logged so large states (California, Texas) don’t dominate purely on population size. |
Each component is ranked with PostgreSQL’s PERCENT_RANK() among all states for that occupation, giving a value from 0 to 1. Those four percentiles are combined with the weights above and multiplied by 100.
Missing data
- If a state has no BEA Regional Price Parity on file, the cost-adjustment step is skipped for that state and the raw (non-adjusted) salary percentile is used instead for that component.
- If any one component is missing entirely for an occupation/state, the score is computed from the remaining components with their weights rescaled to add up to 100%.
- If more than two of the four components are missing, no score is shown at all — a score built from a single number isn’t meaningful.
Scope
Currently state-level only — metropolitan-area Opportunity Scores are a planned future addition, not yet published.