Skip to content

How to play Line of Work

Rules, clues, hints and streaks in Line of Work, the daily guess-the-job-from-its-pay game, explained.

The goal

Name the hidden U.S. job in eight guesses or fewer, using its pay range as your first clue. Everyone gets the same job on the same calendar day, and a new puzzle unlocks at midnight in your own time zone. Line of Work knows 509 jobs, so only job names it recognizes can be guessed, and many jobs answer to other titles too: typing “CPA” offers Accountant, and “RN” offers Registered nurse. Five occupations are missing because the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes only hourly wages for them: actors; dancers; musicians and singers; disc jockeys; and entertainers and performers, all other. The 40 postsecondary teacher occupations, which cover teaching at colleges and universities, are one job, College professor, which can be guessed but is never the job of the day.

Playing a round

  1. Study the pay range before you type anything: the whisker runs from the 10th to the 90th percentile of pay, the box from the 25th to the 75th, and the bold mark is the median, with the five figures printed underneath.
  2. Type a job name into the guess box and pick it from the suggestions, or press Enter once it is highlighted.
  3. Read the row of feedback that appears: pay, jobs, growth, education and field.
  4. Hold that row up against the range to rule jobs in or out, then submit your next guess.
  5. Keep going until you name the job or use your eighth guess, whichever comes first.

Colors and arrows

Each clue is colored blue 🔵, orange 🟠 or grey (⚪ in the share grid). Blue means a match, orange means close, and grey means a miss — the exact match and close thresholds are on the “How the clues work” card below the board. Every row shows the figures for the job you guessed, so you can compare them with the range directly. Pay, jobs, growth and education carry an arrow, ↑ or ↓, pointing from your guess toward the hidden job: an up arrow means the hidden job’s figure is higher than your guess, a down arrow means it is lower. A row that reads Pay $97,550 with a down arrow, for example, tells you the hidden job’s median wage is below $97,550. On Education, up means the hidden job asks for more schooling and down means less. Field never carries an arrow, since there is no “higher” or “lower” field: blue means the same minor group, such as Engineers, and orange means a different minor group in the same major group, such as Engineering.

Hints

Three hints are available each round, always revealed in the same order: the job’s field, which is the title of its minor group, such as “Healthcare diagnosing or treating practitioners”, then the states where the job is most concentrated, then the first letter of its name. The states are the ones where the job makes up the biggest share of local employment compared with the country as a whole, so they are often not the biggest states. Hints you take for free add a light bulb to your shared result. When a short optional ad is available, watching it reveals the same hint without the light bulb, so the choice between a clean solve and an assisted one is always visible to anyone you share with.

Streaks and statistics

Solving the daily puzzle on consecutive days builds your streak. Everything — streak, history and hint use — is stored in your browser rather than an account, so clearing site data resets it.

Archive and unlimited mode

The archive lets you play any past daily puzzle; archive rounds count toward your statistics but never toward your streak. Unlimited mode serves a random job whenever you finish a round, so you can practice reading pay ranges for as long as you like.

Ready? Play today’s puzzle.