O*NET OnLine vs a Wage Tool: Profiles Without the Pay Picture

The candidate just asked what the pay range is — and you're still in a job-profile browser

You finally found the right job description for the journeyman electrician you need. The O*NET OnLine profile for SOC 47-2111 is genuinely impressive: tasks, required knowledge areas, key skills, work context, even the physical demands of the role. You built your posting around it. The candidate sitting across from you right now clearly read it too — and now she's asking what the salary range is.

You don't have an answer ready, because O*NET OnLine doesn't have one to give you. The platform tells you everything about what the job is. It tells you nothing about what it pays.

That gap — an occupational profile with no wage data attached — is the exact moment a trade employer either wins or loses the hire. This article explains what O*NET OnLine does brilliantly, where it stops, and how joining it to a BLS-powered wage tool closes the loop so you can walk into every offer conversation with a defensible number.

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What O*NET OnLine actually gives you (and it's a lot)

O*NET OnLine, developed by the U.S. Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration, is a free, comprehensive database covering more than 1,000 occupational titles and codes. For every occupation it profiles, you get a structured picture of the work itself: detailed task statements, the skills and knowledge areas the role requires, the abilities workers bring to it, work activities, work context (physical environment, hazard exposure, interpersonal demands), and a Job Zone rating.

Job Zone is O*NET's shorthand for how much preparation an occupation typically requires — Zone 1 is little-to-no preparation; Zone 5 is extensive, often graduate-level preparation. Most journey-level trades sit in Zone 3 (medium preparation), reflecting the apprenticeship or vocational-training path workers take to get there. The O*NET profile for electricians, for instance, notes that the occupation typically requires three to four years of apprenticeship plus a licensing exam — context that matters when you're writing a job posting or designing a career ladder. For a deeper look at how these profiles apply to trade hiring, see our guide to O*NET occupational profiles for trades.

All of that content is free and available under a CC BY 4.0 license, meaning you can legally incorporate it into job postings, onboarding documents, and internal competency frameworks as long as you attribute it properly. That's genuinely useful, and it's worth saying clearly: SkilledMarkets uses O*NET as one of its own data sources precisely because the profile data is this good.

But here's the thing O*NET itself will tell you, right on the site: there is no wage data in O*NET OnLine. The platform does not include salary figures, compensation percentiles, or pay ranges. The occupational profile and the pay picture are stored in two completely separate government databases — O*NET for profiles, BLS OEWS (Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics) for wages — and they are not joined anywhere on the public web by default.

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Where the profile ends and the pricing problem begins

The BLS OEWS program is the government's authoritative wage survey. It samples roughly 1.1 million establishments across six semi-annual panels and produces employment and wage estimates — mean, median, and key percentiles — for more than 800 detailed occupations at the national, state, and metropolitan-area level. These are the numbers that actually tell you what to pay.

For a journeyman electrician (SOC 47-2111), BLS OEWS put the national median at $62,350 per year as of May 2024. The 10th percentile — the lower end of what working electricians earn — was $39,430. The 90th percentile was $106,030. That's a $66,600 spread from bottom to top, which means "what do electricians make?" is not a one-number question. The answer depends heavily on experience level, geography, and whether you're competing with union shops. (Always confirm the current figure at bls.gov/oes, since BLS releases updated estimates annually.)

O*NET tells you the electrician needs to know how to read blueprints, work safely around energized systems, and coordinate with other trades on a job site. BLS tells you the 75th-percentile electrician earns more than three-quarters of all electricians in that role — and that's the number you need if you want to win a competitive hire. The two databases complement each other perfectly. They just don't come pre-connected.

The manual workaround most employers use is to open both tabs, pull the BLS CSV or OOH page for the right SOC code, note the percentile figures, and then build a band in a spreadsheet. It works — eventually. It also takes time most hiring managers at a 20-person electrical contractor don't have, and it requires knowing which SOC code maps to which O*NET code (they're related but not always identical — see our breakdown of O*NET SOC vs BLS SOC codes if you've run into that confusion before).

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The join that makes both datasets usable for hiring

A wage tool built on BLS OEWS data does one thing O*NET OnLine cannot: it puts a compensation picture next to the occupational profile, anchored to a government source, so you don't have to hold two browser tabs in your head at the same time.

Here's what that looks like in practice. Say you're building a salary band for a mid-level HVAC technician (SOC 49-9021). The BLS May 2024 national data gives you:

• 10th percentile: $39,130/yr
• Median (50th pct): $59,810/yr
• 90th percentile: $91,020/yr

A salary band — the min/midpoint/max range you use in an offer — starts from one of those percentile anchors. In compensation practice, the midpoint of a band is typically anchored to the market rate you're trying to match, and the band is spread above and below it. Here's a simple worked example using the HVAC median as the midpoint anchor and a ±15% spread buffer:

• Band minimum: $59,810 × 0.85 = ≈$50,800/yr
• Band midpoint: $59,810/yr (median anchor)
• Band maximum: $59,810 × 1.15 = ≈$68,800/yr

This is an illustrative example of the methodology, not a recommendation for your specific market — your actual band should reflect your geography, your benefits package, and the experience tier you're hiring into. For state and metro-level HVAC rates, the national figures above are the starting point; check bls.gov/oes for what the OEWS reports for your specific area. Where a metro cell is suppressed due to small sample size, BLS recommends using the state or national figure as a proxy.

What a purpose-built wage tool adds on top of that arithmetic is the ability to pull the right percentiles for the right SOC code in the right geography without rebuilding the lookup every time — and to see the O*NET profile context alongside it, so your job posting and your offer reflect the same occupational reality. For a comparison of what the free BLS portal gives you versus what a dedicated tool provides, see free BLS data vs a wage tool.

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Why trade hiring makes the gap especially costly

In most white-collar hiring markets, the disconnect between job profile and pay data is an inconvenience. In trade hiring, it's a competitive liability.

Electrician employment sat at 818,700 jobs in 2024, with BLS projecting 9% growth through 2034 — a pace BLS classifies as much faster than average, and roughly three times the economy-wide projected growth rate of 3.1%. HVAC mechanics and installers are growing at 8% over the same period. Construction as a sector was projected to need an estimated 439,000 net new workers in 2025 (ABC). The workers you're trying to hire have options — often several, simultaneously.

At those growth rates and that level of demand, a candidate who counters your offer has almost certainly already run a number through Indeed's salary estimator, asked a union hall contact, or simply looked at what a competitor posted. If your offer isn't grounded in the same BLS data those signals are ultimately derived from, you're negotiating blind against someone who isn't. The cost of losing that negotiation — or winning it by overpaying — compounds quickly. Replacing an employee can cost anywhere from 50% to 200% of their annual salary, using SHRM's published benchmark as a model (these are illustrative ranges to verify against your own retention and recruiting history, not a measured outcome for any specific firm).

An offer built on a defensible BLS anchor isn't just better for the candidate conversation — it's a defensible record if a pay-transparency inquiry ever comes your way. For a full walkthrough of building a benchmark process for trade roles, the skilled trades wage benchmarking guide covers the end-to-end methodology.

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O*NET is a foundation, not a finish line

It's worth being direct about what this comparison is and isn't. O*NET OnLine is not a product to replace or disparage — it's a genuinely excellent public resource that SkilledMarkets itself draws on. The issue isn't that O*NET is flawed. The issue is that it was designed to describe work, not price it, and a trade employer needs both.

The same is true in reverse for the raw BLS OEWS data: the wage percentiles are authoritative and free, but navigating the raw CSV files — selecting the right SOC code, finding the right geographic area, interpreting suppression flags, and then building a band from the output — is a workflow, not a lookup. That workflow is where time and expertise get spent. See our features page for how SkilledMarkets handles that workflow, or the pricing page to see what the subscription costs relative to the time it replaces.

The goal isn't to sell you on the idea that government data is bad. It's to close the gap between a profile you trust (O*NET) and a wage number you can defend (BLS OEWS) — and to get you there before the candidate across the table asks what the range is.

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Ready to see the two datasets working together?

If you'd like to try the join yourself — O*NET occupational profile alongside BLS wage percentiles for your trade and your metro — start a 14-day free trial and run the bands for the roles you're hiring for this month. No spreadsheet required.

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This article includes information from O*NET OnLine, developed by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration. O*NET is a registered trademark of the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration.