Line of Work data and methodology

Where Line of Work’s figures come from: BLS wage statistics for May 2025, job projections to 2035, and how each clue is measured.

Where the pay comes from

Every pay range in Line of Work is drawn from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), using its May 2025 national estimates. OEWS surveys employers about what they pay their workers and publishes, for each detailed occupation, the annual wage at five points: the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentiles. The 10th percentile is the wage that 10 percent of the job’s employees earn less than, and the 90th is the wage that 90 percent earn less than. Line of Work uses those five annual wages as published and takes the 50th, the median, as the Pay clue. OEWS covers wage and salary workers: people on an employer’s payroll. It does not cover the self-employed, so a range describes what employees in a job are paid, not what everyone doing the job brings home. BLS counts base pay together with commissions and tips as wages and leaves out overtime and the cost of benefits.

How each field is defined

Jobs, growth and education

The other figures come from the BLS Employment Projections program for 2025–35, Table 1.2, which lists projections and characteristics for each detailed occupation. Jobs is the 2025 employment figure, and it includes the self-employed. Growth is the projected percent change in employment from 2025 to 2035, and Education is the typical education needed for entry, which BLS assigns to every occupation as one of eight categories: no formal educational credential, high school diploma or equivalent, postsecondary nondegree award, some college without a degree, associate’s degree, bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, and doctoral or professional degree. Line of Work shows them as None, High school, Certificate, Some college, Associate’s, Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral. It is the education typically needed to start the job, not a rule and not what every worker holds.

Because OEWS pay covers employees only while the Employment Projections job counts include the self-employed, the two do not describe exactly the same people. More than half of Real estate agent jobs, 54.3 percent, are self-employed, and so are 62.8 percent of Painter or sculptor jobs, so for those a pay range speaks for the employees among them. When a job is 5 percent or more self-employed, its answer page says so.

Which jobs are included

Line of Work has 509 jobs. Each is a detailed BLS occupation under a plainer name, such as ER doctor or Fast food worker, with other titles the guess box understands, except College professor, which merges 40 of them. A job needs all five annual wages to be drawn, which is why five occupations are left out: BLS publishes only hourly wages for actors; dancers; musicians and singers; disc jockeys; and entertainers and performers, all other. The 40 postsecondary teacher occupations, which BLS lists by subject, are that one job, College professor. It can be guessed, but it is never a daily answer because BLS publishes no state figures for it, so it has no most-concentrated-states hint.

Of the 509 jobs, 296 can be the job of the day. An answer has to have at least 10,000 jobs, a reliable employment estimate and three states for its hint, and it cannot be a catch-all “all other” occupation. No answer reads blue on every clue against any other job in the game, so a wrong guess can always be told apart from the right one.

Most concentrated states

The second hint names the states where the job is most concentrated. It uses the location quotient from OEWS’s state estimates, which is a job’s share of a state’s employment divided by its share of employment in the whole country. A quotient above 1 means the job is more common there than in the country as a whole. Line of Work ranks the 50 states and the District of Columbia by that quotient, considers only those with at least 250 jobs in the occupation, and shows the top three. Because the ranking is about concentration and not headcount, the largest states often do not appear.

The pay axis

Every range is drawn on one logarithmic scale, so the same position always means the same pay. The scale runs from the lowest 10th percentile to the highest 90th percentile of the 509 jobs, rounded outward to $10,000 and $1 million, with gridlines at round values. On a logarithmic scale a range twice as high sits the same distance to the right wherever it starts.

Updates and fairness

The data is fixed at May 2025 for pay and at 2025–35 for jobs, growth and education, and it is not updated during the year. The job chosen for a published puzzle never changes, and the schedule is fixed ahead of time, never repeating a job within 60 days. The figures may be refreshed when BLS publishes a new release or a correction, and if a correction affects a job in a future puzzle, the change is made before that day. To report a data problem, email hello@guessday.com with the puzzle number.

Attribution and independence

The data is credited to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (May 2025) and Employment Projections (2025–35). Both programs are run by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a U.S. government agency, and what it publishes is in the public domain. Line of Work is not affiliated with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. No agency logos appear in the game. The figures are national pay ranges for employees as of May 2025, not a prediction of what a job will pay you where you live. Not career advice.