About PayCrunch

PayCrunch (paycrunch.co) is an independent publisher of United States job-pay figures and occupation-specific playbooks for using AI to move toward the top of a pay range. The site is free. There is no account wall, no quiz, and no invented salary.

Editorial mission

Two questions sit on every job page, in that order:

• What does this occupation actually pay in the United States — at entry, in the middle, and at the top of the published range?
• What concrete work, in this occupation, is how people reach the top of that range, and which parts of that work AI can speed up without breaking the rules of the job?

The first question is a data problem. The second is an editorial one. Mixing them into a generic “AI will change your career” paragraph is how a site becomes thin. PayCrunch keeps them apart: wages come from a named federal release and a named SOC code; playbooks are researched against that occupation’s own tasks and tools, then gated before they can touch the page.

What you will find here

• More than 1,000 job pages with a one-sentence pay answer, the BLS source line, and — where the work has been finished — a unique AI playbook rather than a reused template.
• Free calculators (paycheck, take-home pay, overtime, converters) that run in your browser and do not send the numbers you type.
• Open data: the best-paying state for hundreds of occupations as CSV and JSON, a static JSON API, and embeddable salary cards.
• Longer research, including The AI Job Paradox, which measures pay against AI exposure across the wage table instead of restating headlines.

Where the numbers come from

National wages are the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) May 2025 release. Each mapped occupation is stored with its SOC code. “Top of the range” is not a slogan: it is the highest state-level figure BLS publishes for that job among states that employ at least 500 people in it. Titles BLS does not publish separately are labelled as PayCrunch estimates and are not cited as BLS figures. Tax arithmetic uses published IRS brackets. Cost-of-living adjustments on the homepage use BEA Regional Price Parities and are labelled as price adjustments, not as local wages.

The full rules — SOC mapping, the 500-employee floor, how playbooks are researched, and how often pages are refreshed — live on the Editorial Standards and Methodology page. Who answers for a correction, how drafting assistance is disclosed, and how affiliate links are labelled is on the editorial policy.

Who runs PayCrunch

Matt runs PayCrunch as an independent publisher in San Diego, California. Correspondence and corrections go to Matt at PayCrunch; there is not a newsroom of unnamed “editors.” If a wage, SOC code, or playbook step is wrong, write and it gets checked against the source file, not against a vibe.

How the site is funded

The tools and job pages are free. Advertising (Google AdSense, publisher ca-pub-4897630241601050) is the intended support once inventory is allowed to serve. Ad units are not currently filled. When they serve, they will be labelled and kept out of the pay answer, the wage table, and the playbook. They do not choose which SOC code a page uses or which step a playbook recommends. Some job pages include Amazon Associates links. Those are disclosed on the page and in the editorial policy. Partner IDs are not invented.

Drafting assistance

PayCrunch does not claim that every sentence is written with no software assistance. The monthly job that restamps “Last checked” dates and rebuilds wage sections from the cached BLS file does not use a language model. Playbooks and Career Intelligence notes may be drafted with assistance. Wages, links, and SOC codes are taken from that occupation’s fact pack, and a draft that fails a gate is not published. The editorial policy states that rule in full.

What this site is not

It is not financial, tax, legal, medical, or career advice, and it is not affiliated with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the IRS, or any other agency. A figure on a page is an estimate from the named source for general information. It is not an offer of employment and not a promise that a reader will earn it.