How to find your SOC occupation code and metro

Why the occupation code matters more than the title

Wage data is organized by occupation, not by job title. The Standard Occupational Classification, maintained for federal statistics, assigns every job a six-digit code that groups work by duties. Employers filing a Labor Condition Application choose a SOC code and title, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics OEWS survey publishes wages by the same code. A title such as Member of Technical Staff or Associate Engineer can map to several codes, and each has a different wage distribution.

How to find yours

1. Write the five or six main duties from your offer letter or job description, in plain words.
2. Search a keyword from those duties in O*NET OnLine. Each result shows the occupation, its code and a task list you can compare with your duties.
3. Open the BLS SOC definitions for the top two matches. The definition names the typical work and what is excluded, which settles close calls.
4. Search the occupation name in the offer check to see if there are filings in your area.
5. If the role is on a visa filing, the code is on the LCA itself; employees can ask their employer which one it used.

The code structure

A SOC code has the form XX-XXXX. The first two digits give a major group (15 is Computer and Mathematical, 17 is Architecture and Engineering, 29 is Healthcare Practitioners and Technical), and the next digits narrow to broad and detailed occupations. This site uses the detailed, six-digit level because that is the level at which OEWS publishes wage percentiles. Here are the five biggest job-and-metro groups in the data.

Choosing the right metro

The metro areas on this site are Census Bureau core based statistical areas from the July 2023 delineation files. Each filing is placed in the metro of its first worksite county, and matched to the OEWS estimate for that metro or, if none exists for the occupation, to the state. That has three consequences for you. A suburb belongs to the metro of its county, not its postal city. A remote role is benchmarked by the employer to a worksite it names, so ask which one. And two metros in the same state can differ by tens of percent for the same occupation.

Check for a mismatch before you trust a result

If your result looks too high or too low, the usual causes are, in order, the wrong occupation, the wrong metro, a seniority mismatch (filed wages mix all levels; see the wage levels guide) and a small group. Fix them in that order before drawing conclusions. The official wage levels for a given code and area are in the DOL OFLC wage search linked on the offer check page.

Questions