Line of Work

What is Line of Work?

Line of Work is a free daily guessing game built around a pay range. Every day the site hides one U.S. job behind the range of what its employees are paid in a year — a whisker, a box and a median mark, drawn on a scale that is the same for every job — and you have eight guesses to name it. The range is on the board before you make a single guess, so you can start reasoning straight away. Type any of the 509 jobs in the game into the guess box, from 911 dispatcher to Youth pastor, and submit it. Right or wrong, every guess adds a row of feedback that narrows down what the hidden job is and how it compares with the one you tried. All 509 jobs can be guessed, and 296 of them can come up as the job of the day.

How the clues work

Each guess is compared with the hidden job across five clues. Pay is the job’s median annual wage, compared as a ratio: it matches within 5 percent and reads close within 20 percent, so $40,000 against $48,000 grades the same as $160,000 against $192,000. Jobs is the number of people doing the job in 2025, self-employed included; it matches within 10 percent and reads close within a factor of two. Growth is the projected change in employment from 2025 to 2035: it matches within 1 percentage point and reads close within 4. Education is the typical education needed to start the job, on a ladder of eight levels; it matches on the same level and reads close one level apart. Field uses the government’s occupation groups: it matches if both jobs are in the same minor group, such as Engineers, and reads close if they are only in the same major group, such as Engineering. Every Pay, Jobs, Growth or Education clue that does not match still carries an arrow showing whether the hidden job’s figure is higher or lower than your guess.

Reading the pay range

The range is the puzzle’s main clue. The thin whisker runs from the 10th percentile of pay to the 90th, the box from the 25th to the 75th, and the bold mark is the median, the wage that half of the job’s employees earn more than. The scale underneath is logarithmic and runs from $10,000 to $1 million for every job, so a range twice as high sits the same distance to the right wherever it starts: the gap between $25,000 and $50,000 looks the same as the gap between $250,000 and $500,000. The five figures are printed under the range, and a table with the same numbers sits behind it for screen readers. They are annual wages of employees from May 2025, explained on the data and method page.

Fair play and streaks

Three hints are available each round, always in the same order: the job’s field, which is the title of its minor group, then the states where the job is most concentrated, then the first letter of its name. A hint you reveal for free adds a small light bulb (💡) to the result you share, so friends can tell a clean solve from an assisted one. When a short optional ad is available, you can watch it instead to reveal the same hint without the light bulb. A new job unlocks every day at midnight in your own time zone, everyone gets the same one on the same calendar day, and there is no account to create — your streak and history live in your browser alone.