About SalaryMBA

SalaryMBA exists to answer one question honestly: what is an MBA actually worth? Prospective students are surrounded by confident salary figures — from rankings, brochures, and forums — that rarely say where the number came from, what population it describes, or whether it has been verified. We built SalaryMBA to do the opposite: show the source behind every figure, label what kind of data it is, and refuse to publish numbers we cannot stand behind.

What we do

We are a search-first, data-first reference. You can look up wage benchmarks for the roles MBAs commonly target, compare them across states and metros with a cost-of-living adjustment, and model your own return with transparent ROI and debt-payback calculators. Every calculator output is clearly labeled an estimate, not a promise.

The distinction most sites blur

There is a critical difference between two kinds of numbers, and we never mix them:

• Occupational wage benchmarks — what a role pays across all workers in it, from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. These are honest, useful context for the paths MBAs pursue, but they are not MBA-graduate outcomes. We label every one of them as such.
• Verified MBA-specific outcomes — what MBA graduates of a particular program actually earned, sourced from cited school employment reports or moderated aggregate submissions. We publish these only once they clear sample-size thresholds, and never present occupational wages as if they were MBA outcomes.

Blurring those two is the most common way MBA salary numbers mislead. Keeping them separate is the core of what we do. You can read the full approach in our methodology.

Where our data comes from

Our wage benchmarks are drawn from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) (May 2024 estimates (published April 2025)), retrieved directly from the BLS public data API. Cost-of-living adjustments use the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional Price Parities. School context (cost, debt, and undergraduate earnings) comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard. Every public figure carries a source badge identifying its origin, year, and whether it is verified, an estimate, or demonstration data.

How we stay independent

SalaryMBA is an independent publication. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or paid by any business school or employer to change what we show. We may display advertising or clearly labeled sponsored placements to support the free content, but sponsorship never alters rankings, salary figures, or ROI estimates — that separation is a firm editorial rule, not a preference. See our editorial standards for the specifics.

Who we are

SalaryMBA is an independently operated reference site. Our work is data engineering and editorial: sourcing primary government datasets, building the display gates and provenance system that keep unverified numbers off the site, and writing plain-English explanations of what the data can and cannot tell you. Have a correction, a source, or a question? We want to hear it — contact us.

What we will not do

We will not publish a salary, ROI, or debt figure as verified unless it is source-backed. We will not present a role’s occupational wage as an MBA-specific outcome. We will not let a sponsor buy a better ranking. And we will not call an estimate a fact. Those constraints cost us pages and precision we could otherwise claim — and they are exactly why the numbers here are worth trusting.