About
About RateOrchard
We help US readers see what salaries and career outcomes look like for their role, in their state. No signups, no walls, no guessing.
Our mission
Wages move. Industry mix, cost of living, regional demand, and the wider economy all shift what a job pays from one state to another and one year to the next. Most career sites lock the data behind logins and push you toward a single next click. RateOrchard is built to let you see the actual numbers, side by side, with the source listed next to each one.
How we source data
Every number on the site comes from a small set of public US government data sources:
- BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OES) for wages by SOC occupation × state, including the full distribution from the 10th to the 90th percentile.
- BLS Employment Projections (EP) for 10-year occupation growth projections.
- O*NET Online (US Department of Labor) for skills, tasks, education, and job-zone classifications.
- US Census Bureau ACS for housing, demographics, and cost-of-living inputs.
- BEA Regional Price Parities for state-level cost-of-living adjustments used in our calculators.
- FRED (St. Louis Fed) for inflation (CPI) and macro context.
We do not scrape Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn, Levels.fyi, or Payscale. When a page shows a number, the box labelled Data sources lists the agency, the report name, and the observation date.
Editorial process
Our salary pages combine data from those sources with a short editorial section that puts the number in context. That section is drafted with the help of a large language model, against the page's fact JSON, and reviewed by a named human editor before it is published. No number in the prose can exist outside the fact JSON for the page. Details are in our editorial policy.
What we are not
RateOrchard is a data publisher, not a licensed career or financial advisor. We do not employ licensed financial planners, recruiters, or career coaches. We do not give individualised career advice. We do not collect resumes, run job boards, or sell leads. When an outbound link goes to a partner whose service we earn a commission from (an online course, a resume builder, a coaching platform), we say so in the same paragraph as the link. We never rank or endorse a service on the basis of that commission.
If you need regulated advice for your own situation, speak to a licensed professional in your state. Our job is to show you what the data says; theirs is to help you act on it.
The team
RateOrchard is edited by Adrian Serafin (editor in chief). Adrian is a data journalist, not a licensed financial or career advisor. Every page is signed, dated, and traceable to its sources. As the site grows we plan to add a US-based contributing editor for fact-checking; when that happens their name and background will appear on this page and on the pages they reviewed. Until then, the byline is ours and ours alone. If you want to contribute, reach us at [email protected].