About
How this site is made
Salary Roadmap is an independent, sourced reference for adults switching into a high-paying career. It publishes nothing it cannot trace to a named source and a date.
Who writes it
Bilal Tahir, editor, salary roadmap. Engineer and founder who builds data products; reconciles BLS OEWS, issuing-body fee schedules and market salary data for every page on this site. Contact: hello@salaryroadmap.com.
How is a salary band built?
Every career page starts from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (May 2025 release, published May 2026) for the closest Standard Occupational Classification code, and names that code. Where a job's pay depends heavily on level, bonus or employer type (banking, sales, quant, big-tech engineering), the band is widened with level-specific market data from Levels.fyi, Glassdoor, RepVue, Wall Street Oasis or the relevant industry survey, and the page says which. We do not average sources that disagree; we report both figures and explain the gap. All figures are US, annual, in US dollars, and the page states whether they are base salary or total cash.
Where do certification costs come from?
Exam fees, formats, prerequisites, renewal rules and pass rates come from the issuing body's own pages (PMI, CFA Institute, NASBA, CFP Board, ISC2, CompTIA, AWS, the Linux Foundation, the SOA, FINRA, Microsoft, Google via Coursera). Each fee row carries the month it was checked. Pay-impact claims come from the credential's own salary survey, with the sample size, and are labelled as correlation, not cause.
How often is each number checked?
| Data | Cadence | Most recent check |
|---|---|---|
| Salary bands | Quarterly, and on each BLS OEWS release | 16 September 2026 |
| Certification fees and pass rates | On issuing-body change, at least twice a year | 16 September 2026 |
| Course titles, hours and prices | Every build | 16 September 2026 |
| Job outlook | On each BLS Employment Projections release | August 2026 |
What we don't do
We don't sell leads, we don't rank courses by commission, and we don't publish a number we couldn't trace to a source. When two sources disagree, the page says so.
Corrections
If a figure on this site is wrong or out of date, email hello@salaryroadmap.com with the page URL and the source you are looking at. Corrections are made on the page and the page's "updated" date changes; material corrections are noted in the text.
Affiliate disclosure
Some links are affiliate links. If you enroll or buy through one, we may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. Programs we participate in or have applied to: meta, coursera, coursera plus, udemy, edx, datacamp, skillshare, kaplan, becker, uworld, wall street prep, cfi, nordvpn, blinkist, shortform, grammarly, squarespace. Commissions never change which resources we list; the roadmap picks are made on hours, price and outcomes first.
How to cite this site
Cite as: Salary Roadmap, “page title”, checked month year, URL. Every page carries its own checked date and a numbered source list, and a machine-readable index is at /llms.txt.