How to find your occupation's SOC code

The occupations hub lists about 830 occupations by their SOC titles, and job titles rarely match them. A “customer success manager,” a “scrum master” or a “patient care technician” has a code, but not under that name. Here is how to find it.

Start with the direct match title file

BLS publishes, with each SOC revision, a file of several thousand common job titles mapped to the detailed occupation each one belongs to. It is the fastest route when your title is ordinary. “Bookkeeper” maps to 43-3031, bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks; “paralegal” to 23-2011. The file is on the 2018 SOC page and can be searched in any spreadsheet program. The site’s search box over the occupation catalog does a similar job for the titles BLS uses in OEWS.

Classify by the work, not the title

When the title is not in the file, apply the SOC’s own rules. Classify by the activity that takes most of the working time. A “scrum master” spends most of the day coordinating software projects, which is project management specialists (13-1082) rather than software developers. A “patient care technician” who mostly assists nurses with basic care is a nursing assistant (31-1131). A supervisor who spends most of the time supervising belongs in the first-line supervisors code for that group, not in the supervised occupation.

If a job combines two occupations in roughly equal measure, the guide says to classify it in the one requiring the higher skill. If it still fits nothing, the residual “all other” code for the broad group is the correct answer, not a forced match. See how BLS defines occupations for the structure.

Use the Occupational Outlook Handbook

Each handbook profile lists the SOC codes it covers and a “similar occupations” section. Reading the duties in a profile against your own day is a reliable way to settle between neighboring codes, for example between management analysts (13-1111) and operations research analysts (15-2031). The handbook’s A-Z index accepts many common titles. See what the OOH is.

Use the employer’s own coding

Larger employers assign SOC codes to their positions for federal reporting, and human resources departments can usually say which code a position carries. Federal job announcements carry an OPM occupational series, which has a published crosswalk to SOC; see how federal GS pay works. State labor departments’ wage pages use the same codes as this site.

Check the result

Having found a code, test it. Read the SOC definition and the OOH duties: do they describe the work? Look at the occupation’s wage table on this site and at the state table for your state: is the median in the range you would expect for the job, and is employment plausible? A code whose national employment is a few thousand is unlikely to be right for a common job. Check the major group: a code starting 15 is computing and mathematics; if your job is sales of software, it belongs in 41, sales, however technical the product.

Common traps

Industry is not occupation. A nurse in a bank is a nurse (29-1141), not a financial occupation. Seniority is not occupation: a senior accountant and a junior accountant share 13-2011; only a move into mostly supervisory work changes the code. Education is not occupation: a person with a law degree working as a compliance officer is coded as a compliance officer (13-1041).

Why this matters for reading wages: a code that is one step off can differ in median wage by half. The tables on this site are only as useful as the code you bring to them.