Where our numbers come from
No made-up salaries. Every number attached to a role or major on ZEIRO is published by a free, official source, and we say which one under each figure.
Pay
BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025
Every wage figure — the typical starting band, the median and the top quarter — is the national, all-industry estimate from the government's employer wage survey. Nothing is estimated or written by us.
View the source dataJob outlook and education requirements
BLS Employment Projections, 2025-35
Projected job growth, average yearly openings, and the education, experience and on-the-job training employers usually expect come from the federal ten-year employment projections.
View the source dataWho works in each job
BLS Current Population Survey, 2025 annual averages
Gender and race or ethnicity shares come from the national household labour survey. It publishes these for larger occupations only, so we show them for 59 of the occupations behind our roles and leave them out everywhere else.
View the source dataMajors
New York Fed, The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates (US Census ACS)
Starting pay, unemployment, the share of graduates working jobs that don't need a degree, and the share holding a graduate degree all come from the New York Fed's college labour market data, built on US Census survey microdata.
View the source dataPay with a master's or doctorate
US Census ACS 2023 1-year microdata (PUMS)
Each major's Master's and Doctorate figures are measured, not estimated. We take the Census microdata, keep full-time workers who studied that field, and compare what those who finished the higher degree earn with what bachelor's holders in the same field and age range earn — master's at ages 25-34, doctorate and professional degrees at ages 30-39, since almost nobody holds one before 30. Only that ratio is used, applied to the New York Fed starting pay above, so the undergrad number never changes. A field needs at least 100 people behind a level; otherwise we use the closest broader group of fields and say so, and when even that is too thin we show no pay figure at all.
View the source dataHow roles are matched
Government data is published by official occupation, and job titles students actually see are often narrower. We matched all 238 ZEIRO roles to an official occupation: 151 are an exact match, and the rest use the closest official occupation that genuinely contains the work. Wherever a figure uses the closest match rather than an exact one, the note under it names the occupation the numbers describe.
What is our own judgement
Coursework difficulty, study hours, how competitive a path feels, how easily a major pivots, and all written descriptions are ZEIRO's own editorial read, not official statistics. They're labelled as such wherever they appear.