About the state wage data

The employment and wage estimates used in this story derive from the Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) survey, a cooperative program between state employment departments and the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. The OES program sorts workers into more than 800 standard occupational categories.

At the request of The Seattle Times, the state Employment Security Department separated the full OES database for Washington into two parts: state employees and everyone else. (The "everyone else" group includes federal and local-government employees as well as private-sector workers.)

The newspaper then matched state and nonstate workers by occupational category, ending up with nearly 200 categories (covering about 87 percent of state workers) for which there were statistically meaningful data.

The OES estimates cover wages only, not pension and health-care benefits, employers' contributions to Social Security, and the like. The data therefore may not be comparable to other reports that use broader gauges of employee compensation.

— Drew DeSilver