Editorial policy

1. What we publish

RateOrchard publishes two kinds of pages: data pages (one per state, product, or profile) and editorial pages (longer-form articles in the blog). Data pages combine structured information pulled from public sources with a short editorial section that explains the context. Editorial pages are reported and written by a named human author.

2. Sources

Every numerical claim on the site is traceable to one of the following:

• BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OES) for state and metro wage estimates
• BLS Employment Projections (EP) for 10-year occupation growth projections
• BLS Current Employment Statistics (CES) for monthly employment changes
• O*NET Online (US Department of Labor) for skills, tasks, and job-zone classifications
• US Census Bureau ACS 5-year estimates for housing and demographics
• BEA Regional Price Parities (RPP) for state-level cost-of-living adjustments
• FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) for inflation (CPI) and macro context

Each page renders a Data sources box with the exact report and the observation date. If we cannot locate an authoritative source for a claim, we do not publish the claim.

3. AI assistance and human review

We are transparent about where and how we use generative AI. The editorial commentary on each data page is drafted with the assistance of a large language model (Anthropic Claude, currently the Sonnet 4 family) constrained by a published voice and style guide. The model receives the page's fact JSON as input; no number appearing in the drafted prose can exist outside that fact JSON. This is a retrieval-augmented approach: the model composes narrative structure, not figures.

Every data page draft is reviewed by a human editor before it is marked approved and indexed. Drafts that have not passed review are not shown to readers. The human review step verifies: numbers against the fact JSON, claims against the cited source, tone against our voice guide, and the absence of advice-like language.

Blog articles and product explainers are written by named humans first, optionally polished with language tooling, and always bylined. Data pages carry an explicit disclosure that the commentary is AI-drafted and human-reviewed.

No decisions that affect readers (ranking, exclusion, recommendation) are made by an automated system without human oversight.

4. Review cadence

Each data page shows a Last updated timestamp. That timestamp changes when one of two things happens: a data refresh replaces at least one underlying number, or an editor reviews and signs off on the page. At minimum, every page in the salary and career vertical is reviewed by a named editor once per quarter, in line with how Google guidance treats YMYL-adjacent content.

5. Corrections

If we publish an error, we fix it as soon as we can verify the correct value, we annotate the page with the date of the correction and the reason, and we keep an internal log of every correction with timestamp and reason. A public corrections index will publish at /corrections once we have the first correction to log. To report a possible error, email [email protected]. We aim to acknowledge correction requests within two business days.

6. Independence, affiliate relationships, and conflicts of interest

RateOrchard earns revenue from two streams: display advertising (Google AdSense and, when thresholds are met, approved ad management partners such as Mediavine or Raptive) and outbound affiliate links to third-party career services such as online learning platforms, resume builders, and career coaching providers.

What we do not do:

• We do not collect personal information on this Site. We operate no on-site form that captures name, email, phone, or location for the purpose of contacting you or selling that information to a third party. Our calculators are 100% client-side.
• We do not act as a recruiter, career coach, financial advisor, or lead generator. We hold no career-services or financial licenses.
• We do not rank courses, resume tools, coaching providers, or other partners on the basis of how much commission we earn. Methodology, where ranking exists, explains the criteria we do use.
• No editor holds personal equity in a partner we cover. When that changes, we disclose it on this page first.

When a link on the site leads to an affiliate partner, the surrounding block states so in plain English and identifies the partner. We work only with partners that operate as legitimate licensed businesses in their jurisdiction; the collection of consumer data on those partner sites sits with them under their own privacy policies, not with us.

7. Not career or financial advice

RateOrchard publishes reference material, not personal career or financial advice. Wages, occupational outlook, and skill demand vary by state, specialization, employer, and individual experience. Before acting on anything you read here, confirm with a licensed professional.

8. Community contributions

On each salary state page, readers can submit their own salary anonymously. Once five approved submissions exist for the same role and state combination, an aggregate appears in a clearly distinguished "Reader-reported" block, separate from BLS and DOL data. We never publish an individual submission.

We do not collect names, emails, phones, or addresses on the submission form. Only a salted hash of the submitter's IP and user-agent is stored, used solely to prevent duplicate submissions and to enforce a three-per-day rate limit. Submissions that pass an automated check (Cloudflare Turnstile, honeypot, time-on-form, wage range, deviation from the BLS state median, profanity scan) are auto-approved; everything flagged lands in a human-reviewed queue. Full detail on the community data methodology page.

9. Contact the editor

Tips, corrections, takedown concerns: [email protected]. For DMCA notices, see our DMCA page.