A self-selection audit

Boston salary reporting reality check

Explore base-pay disclosures from one r/boston salary thread, then compare their shape with the 2024 American Community Survey for Greater Boston. No total-compensation estimates. No personal benchmark. No direct identifiers.

Read the comparison carefully. Reddit is a voluntary convenience sample; ACS is a population survey. In the default view, ACS “earnings” includes wages, salary, and self-employment income for everyone age 16+ with earnings, including part-time workers. The ACS-only toggle can restrict that benchmark to currently employed people who usually work 35+ hours. The Reddit extraction does not annualize hourly pay. The gap therefore measures both reporting bias and differences in scope—not a pure causal estimate of Reddit bias.

Disclosures

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Anonymous, rounded records

Median base pay

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ACS comparison: —

Average base pay

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ACS comparison: —

90th percentile

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Within filtered disclosures

At least $100K

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ACS metro: —

Filter-aware benchmark

Greater Boston earners

2024 ACS · metro area

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Share earning $100K+

The public benchmark updates when a supported Gender, Industry, or Occupation filter is selected.

The thread overrepresents six-figure earners

Share at or above $100,000. Gender uses exact Boston ACS tables; Age uses Massachusetts ACS microdata and is labeled accordingly.

Reddit base payACS earnings

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Filtered Reddit disclosures

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Greater Boston ACS

Unfiltered sample

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as likely to appear in the $100K+ bin

Reddit vs. ACS earnings bands

Published ACS bands. Click a Reddit bar to filter; the salary input adds a gold reference marker.

Greater Boston ACS table B20001 publishes $100K+ as one open-ended category.

Base-pay distribution

Hover for counts; click a bar to isolate a $25K interval. The salary input adds a gold reference marker.

Who reports here vs. who works in Greater Boston

100% stacked age composition: Reddit salary disclosures compared with employed residents in the 2024 ACS.

Who reports education vs. who works in Greater Boston

Dynamic 100% stacked education composition: filtered Reddit salary disclosures compared with employed residents in the 2024 ACS.

Reported vs. actual average pay by industry

Ranked by the filtered Reddit mean. BLS matches use 2024 Greater Boston private-sector QCEW annual wages per employee.

Reddit reported meanBLS QCEW average

Only industries with at least five Reddit disclosures are shown. QCEW comparisons appear only for defensible NAICS sector matches; ambiguous labels remain unmatched.

Industry mix: reports vs. private employment

A 100% stacked view across the industries with clean Reddit-to-NAICS matches.

Finance and Insurance are combined to match NAICS 52. Unmatched and unstated Reddit industries are excluded from both normalized bars and counted here.

Age-band pay profile

Medians among people who stated an age; point size reflects disclosure count. A compared salary appears as a horizontal gold line.

Who stated a gender?

This is disclosure composition, not the gender composition of Boston workers.

Industry detail

Ranked by average reported base pay; minimum five observations. “Est.” marks modeled composites.

Industry	n	Reddit mean	BLS / proxy average

How public benchmarks respond

The ACS population toggle changes only the Census side. “Full-time employed” means currently employed and usually working 35+ hours per week; it is not restricted to year-round workers.
Gender M/F updates the exact Greater Boston published comparison for all earners; full-time comparisons use Massachusetts ACS PUMS.
Age updates a weighted Massachusetts ACS PUMS earnings cross-tab; M/F can be combined with Age.
Occupation uses the closest Boston-area BLS OEWS major group or detailed occupation where the mapping is defensible.
Industry uses Greater Boston QCEW annual wages per employee or an explicitly labeled proxy.
Education, sector type, and unsupported multi-filter intersections retain the closest supported benchmark and are labeled accordingly.

Canada / U.S. comparison

Toronto and Boston under the same filters

Both Reddit samples respond to the active page filters. Currency conversion happens before pay-band matching, so the comparison uses one consistent scale.

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Toronto Reddit median—filtered thread sample

Boston Reddit median—filtered thread sample

Toronto official—matched public benchmark

Boston official—matched public benchmark

Reported pay summary

Median, average, and 90th percentile for the two filtered Reddit samples.

Exact comparison table

All money values use this site’s native currency.

Metric	Toronto / Canada	Boston / U.S.

High-earner concentration

Share at or above the currency-equivalent 100K threshold. Official shares use published bands with interpolation inside the open top band.

Official benchmark

Original Toronto salary thread ↗Original Boston salary thread ↗

What the Census comparison says

The Reddit thread is dramatically richer than the metro-wide earnings population at the $100K threshold.
It cannot tell us whether high earners are more likely to use Reddit, more likely to disclose, or both.
The ACS top category ends at “$100,000 or more.” The optional tail view preserves that published total and models only its internal distribution.
Household income is not used: comparing one person’s pay with a household total would be statistical applesauce.

Sources and privacy

Population benchmarks: U.S. Census Bureau 2024 ACS 1-year table B20001 for Boston earnings bands, table B23001 for employed-resident age composition, table B23006 for employed-resident education, and Massachusetts PUMS for age, gender, full-time status, mean earnings, and median earnings. Full-time means currently employed with usual weekly hours of at least 35; it is not restricted to year-round workers. PUMS identifies states and PUMAs, not the Boston metro, so PUMS-derived comparisons are statewide and explicitly labeled. Job benchmarks: BLS May 2025 OEWS occupational wages and 2024 QCEW annual employment and wages. Technology maps to 54151; legal to 5411; finance and insurance are combined under 52. Marketing uses 541613, 541810, and 541910. Pharma/biotech estimates a Boston research-management mix from 5417/541714/541715 and 55111. Because Boston NAICS 92 is not published in the annual area file, the public-administration pay benchmark is national and its Boston frequency is projected from the national job share.

The interactive payload contains anonymous, rounded records only: no usernames, comment text, comment IDs, timestamps, scores, permalinks, or total-compensation fields. Pay is rounded to the nearest $1,000 and exact age is replaced with a band.