You'll now see a line like this near the top of most job pages on this site: "Pay rank: #33 of 861 US occupations tracked on this site — higher-paying than roughly 96% of them, and #1 of 31 within finance & accounting." It's a genuinely useful way to size up a salary figure at a glance, but it's worth being precise about what it is and isn't measuring.
What it actually measures
The rank is calculated by sorting every occupation we track by its national median salary, from highest to lowest, and recording where a given job lands in that order. It's recalculated fresh at every site rebuild, directly from the same ONS ASHE and BLS OES figures already shown elsewhere on the page — it isn't a separate estimate or a third-party score.
The category rank (the "#1 of 31 within finance & accounting" part) does the same thing, but only against other occupations we've classified into that same category, which gives you a narrower, more like-for-like comparison than the site-wide figure alone.
What it deliberately doesn't claim
This is a rank among the occupations covered on this site, not an official rank against the full UK or US occupational classification. ONS and BLS between them track more detailed occupation codes than we currently publish pages for, so a rank of "#33 of 861" means 33rd out of the 861 we track — not 33rd out of every job in the country. We'd rather state that limitation plainly than let a precise-looking number imply more authority than the underlying data supports.
It's also a snapshot of median pay only. It says nothing about job availability, how competitive a role is to get into, how pay varies within the role by seniority or location (the percentile and regional tables elsewhere on the page cover that), or how pleasant the work actually is day to day. Treat it as one more data point for sizing up a salary figure quickly, not a verdict on whether a job is "better" than another.