If you've compared a UK job page against its paired US page on this site, you may have noticed the two titles don't always read as a clean translation of each other — "Financial Managers and Directors" on the UK side, for example, paired with just "Financial Managers" on the US side. That's not a typo. It reflects a real difference in how the two countries classify occupations.
Two different classification systems
UK job pages on this site are built from the Office for National Statistics' SOC 2020 classification. US pages are built from the US Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The two systems were developed independently and don't slice up the labour market into identical categories — a role that UK statisticians group under one heading can sit across two narrower US categories, or vice versa, and some roles that are common in one country barely register as a separate line item in the other's classification.
How we pick a pairing
Where a UK occupation has a close US counterpart, we show both on the same page so you can compare them directly in their own currency. That pairing is our own editorial best match between the two classification systems, not an official government cross-reference — ONS and BLS don't publish a joint UK/US occupation-mapping table for us to draw from. We pick the closest real match based on the actual scope of work each code describes, and we'd rather pair two roles that are genuinely close in scope with slightly different titles than force an exact title match between two jobs that don't actually cover the same work.
Where no reasonably close US match exists, the page says so rather than forcing a pairing — you'll see this on some UK-only occupations that simply don't have a direct equivalent under the US SOC system, and on the reverse US-only pages for roles with no close UK match.
What this means for comparing the two figures
Because the pairing is a scope match rather than an exact title match, treat the two salary figures as describing closely related jobs, not identical ones. If the scope difference matters for your own situation — say, if the UK role's remit visibly includes something the US pairing's title doesn't mention — read both occupations' descriptions (where O*NET data is available) rather than relying on the title alone.