About FastWages
FastWages is a reference for what work pays in the United States: what each occupation earns, where it earns most, how pay is distributed, what the minimum wage is in every state and in the cities that set their own, and what the federal government and the military pay by grade.
It is being built in the open. The first sections (occupations, states, minimum wage, learn, tools) arrive together as the first content wave; the rest follow once that wave is indexed. Until then the site has no data pages and asks search engines not to index it.
What it is not
FastWages never computes a person's pay. Paycheck withholding, take-home pay, overtime, pay-raise and GS step calculators live on FastCalc, and each relevant page here links to the matching one. There are no salary surveys, no pages about an employer or a named person, no job listings and no career advice.
Where the numbers come from
Every figure comes from a public-domain United States federal publication. The four sources, and what each one supplies:
- Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS): Hourly and annual wage percentiles, mean wage and employment for about 830 detailed occupations, nationally, by state and by metropolitan area. Released each spring for the previous May; the reference month is printed with every figure.
- U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division: The federal minimum wage, the state minimum wage table and the tipped minimum wage table. City and county rates come from each ordinance, cited on the row.
- U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM): The General Schedule base table, the locality pay tables, and the Senior Executive Service, Executive Schedule and law enforcement officer tables, each with its effective date.
- Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS): Monthly basic pay by pay grade and years of service for enlisted members, warrant officers and commissioned officers, and the drill pay table.
How the data is handled
- Nothing is typed in by hand. Each publisher file is downloaded, parsed and checked against known answers by a tested pipeline, and every page is regenerated from it. A sentence that states a number is generated from that number.
- Every dollar carries its reference period. Wages are labelled with the OEWS reference month, pay tables with their effective date, minimum wages with the date the rate was last verified against the statute or ordinance.
- Distributions, not averages. The headline figure is the median. The mean is shown next to it, never alone.
- Suppressed stays suppressed. Where BLS withholds a cell, the page says so. Nothing is estimated, interpolated or averaged across areas to fill a gap.
- Law is summarised, never advised. Minimum-wage, overtime and exemption pages state the rule and cite the statute or regulation. They are not legal advice.
- Written text is cited and reviewed. Occupation descriptions and explainers are written in our own words from at least two cited sources and reviewed before publication. Nothing is copied from Wikipedia or from salary sites.
Corrections
If a figure, a date or a citation is wrong, tell us which page it is on and, if you can, where the publisher shows something different: contact@fastwages.us. Corrections to data are made in the pipeline, so the fix reaches every page that used the figure, and the change is recorded in the repository history.
Who runs it
FastWages is one of a family of small reference sites that share one platform: FastCalc, FastNames, FastFlags, FastAstro and FastCosmos. The sites are independent of every publisher they cite and have no relationship with any government agency.