How this was made

The rule everything rests on

Every non-obvious figure on this site carries a small marker showing where it came from. Hover it, or tap it on a phone, and it tells you the specific source.

This is not decoration. If you catch one unmarked wrong number on a site like this, you should stop trusting the accurate ones too — and you would be right to. So the marker is not something a writer remembers to add. It is built into the structure: a number on this site cannot exist without a source attached, and the build fails if one is missing. There is no code path here that can print an unlabelled figure.

What each label means

There are two kinds. The distinction matters more than any individual number.

Measured

A named source means someone counted. BLS is US government wage statistics. O*NET is the US occupational database. NHS is published UK pay scales. SCFHS is the Saudi Commission for Health Specialties. Each of these carries the year it refers to, because a salary without a year is close to meaningless.

Not measured

reported means no official statistic exists, but the same thing is described consistently across multiple independent credible accounts. It has to be a pattern, not an anecdote — a claim marked this way is required to record how many separate accounts support it, and one angry forum post does not qualify.

estimated means nobody published this and it has been worked out by reasoning — from an adjacent occupation, from a comparable economy, or from the structural logic of the job. Every estimate is required to state its basis, and you can read that reasoning by tapping the marker. If the reasoning looks weak to you, distrust the number. That is the point of showing it.

Estimates are used deliberately rather than avoided. An empty field helps nobody. But an estimate presented as a measurement is a lie, so they are always visibly marked and never dressed up.

Things this site refuses to do

• No percentage matches. No career here will ever be a “91% match” for you. That number would be invented, and a made-up number about your future is worse than no number.
• No stress bars or lifestyle ratings. Stress is a judgement, not a measurement. Drawing it as a bar out of ten implies someone measured it. So stress, hours and workload are described in words, and there is no number stored anywhere that a bar could be drawn from.
• No single salary figures. Pay is always a range, always with the country, the year and the source. Where the spread is large, the page explains what causes it instead of quietly averaging it away.
• No placeholder pages. A career appears here only once it has actually been researched. If you cannot find something, it is because it has not been written yet — not because it does not matter.

Where the salary numbers come from

US figures are real percentile bands from government wage statistics — the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentile. That is why you see a range rather than an average: an average is dragged upward by a small number of very high earners, and the median is a much better description of what actually happens to people.

One caveat worth understanding: those percentiles describe everyone in the job at one moment in time, not one person’s career. Mapping them onto entry/mid/senior is an interpretation, and in careers with long training the bottom band often reflects people still in training rather than a badly-paid version of the finished job. Where that applies, the page says so.

UK figures come from published national pay scales, which is why they are narrower and more predictable than the US ones.

Saudi data is the weakest part, and that is worth saying

Saudi-specific content is the most useful thing on this site and the hardest to source. There is no accessible published wage statistic broken down by occupation in the way the US and UK publish theirs.

Licensing and qualification requirements are solid — those come from official bodies and are published policy. Salary figures are much weaker, and are generally marked reported or estimated. Where sources contradict each other — and for Saudi salaries they contradict each other badly, sometimes by a factor of five — the page says which structure the figure is based on rather than quietly picking one and presenting it as fact.

Salary aggregator websites were deliberately not used as sources. Their numbers are modelled rather than measured, and for this region they disagree with each other so severely that averaging them would produce a confident-looking number with nothing behind it.

What this site cannot tell you

It cannot tell you what to do. It has no opinion about you, collects nothing about you, and is not trying to place you anywhere.

It also goes out of date. Licensing rules change, salaries move, and fields shift. Every career page carries the date it was last researched. Before you make an actual decision — choosing subjects, applying somewhere, moving country — check the licensing requirement with the official body yourself. This site is a starting point for looking properly, not a substitute for it.