If you look up "software engineer salary" on a job site and then on the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, you can get two very different answers. On 23 October 2026, Jobiba's salary page put the median pay listed in US software engineer job ads at about $223,500. The BLS figure for the same occupation (May 2025) was $135,980.

Neither number is wrong. They measure different things.

What each number measures

Pay listed in job ads is what employers advertise for jobs open right now. It comes from ads that state pay, and the employers who state pay most are large, pay-transparent companies, often in big tech hubs. Many US states also require a range, and the top of a range is a ceiling few new hires reach.

Official wage statistics (BLS OEWS in the US, ONS ASHE in the UK, Job Bank in Canada) survey what people in the job are actually paid, across every employer: small firms, public bodies, every region. They are slower (the US figure is from May 2025) but much broader.

In short: the job-ad figure shows what employers are offering now, mostly at the top end. The official figure shows what a typical person in the job is paid.

How to use both

  1. Negotiating an offer: compare it with the job-ad range for your city and level. That is the market you are in right now.
  2. Checking whether a salary is normal: use the official median. A job paying near it is ordinary; one well below it deserves a question.
  3. Look at the sample size. A job-ad figure from 9 ads is a hint. One from 400 ads is a pattern. Good salary pages tell you how many.
  4. Watch the unit. Canada's Job Bank publishes hourly wages; most job ads list yearly pay. Never compare an hourly figure with a yearly one without converting both the same way.
  5. Watch the currency and the period. In India, a figure like "25,000" in an ad is usually monthly; "8 LPA" is yearly (lakhs per annum).

How Jobiba shows it

Our salary pages label our figure as "pay listed in job ads", show the sample size, and, for the US, the UK and Canada, show the official figure beside it with its source and date. When the two differ by a lot, the page says so in one sentence instead of hiding one of them.

You can see this on any US role page, for example software engineer salaries.

Bhagwati Suthar is the founder of Jobiba (Jobiba AI Labs).