For career centers and workforce programs
Help students see beyond the headline salary
Free, embeddable compensation tools for university career centers, community colleges, and workforce development programs. No accounts, no tracking, no student data collected — designed from the start to be FERPA-friendly.
What students actually need
Pre-offer evaluation
A student asks "what does $65,000 actually look like per paycheck in California?" They plug their state and filing status into the take-home pay calculator and see monthly numbers they can plan around — rent, student loans, transit. This is the single most useful tool for first-generation students, who often don't know the difference between gross and net until their first deposit is 30% smaller than expected in 2026 dollars.
Offer comparison
Two offers on the table: Job A at $70,000 with no equity, Job B at $65,000 with 500 RSUs vesting over 4 years. The student opens the job offer comparison calculator and sees the total comp over 4 years. Often the lower-headline offer wins, but only when you can see the math side by side.
Negotiation preparation
Before walking into a salary conversation, a student runs the negotiation script generator. The tool pulls BLS OEWS wage data for the role + region and produces a tailored script. Students who prepare with the script are measurably more likely to negotiate, and more likely to succeed.
Calculators students use most
Five tools cover the bulk of pre-grad and post-grad compensation conversations. All are free, embeddable, and respect the no-data policy.
Take-Home Pay Calculator
Why students use it: The #1 tool students miss. Shows $50,000 → $38,200 net in any state with 401(k) options.
Open calculator →Salary Comparison
Why students use it: Side-by-side comparison for two job offers ($60K vs $72K with 4% bonus). Useful in second-look visits.
Open calculator →Job Offer Comparison
Why students use it: Total comp view including signing bonus ($15,000), equity (1,000 RSUs × $80 strike), and benefits — for offers with non-base components.
Open calculator →Negotiation Script Generator
Why students use it: AI-assisted script pulling BLS wage data for the role. Students walk in prepared.
Open calculator →Income Percentile
Why students use it: Context-setting tool. Helps students understand where their offer ranks nationally.
Open calculator →No-cost + no-data policy
For FERPA-adjacent institutions, the only acceptable data arrangement is one where no student data crosses the wire. We built SalaryLabs to satisfy that constraint from day one.
No student accounts
Students never sign up, never provide an email, never create a profile. They open the URL, use the tool, and close the tab.
No student data collected
SalaryLabs has no analytics that track what students are computing. We use Cloudflare Web Analytics (cookieless, no personal data) for high-level traffic counts, and that's it. Calculator inputs stay in the browser. We never see them.
FERPA-friendly by design
Because no student data crosses the wire, there is no FERPA-protected information to safeguard. Your institution's privacy office won't need to review the embed. All government data is from official US government sources (irs.gov, bls.gov, ssa.gov) updated weekly.
Free, with no commercial relationship
We do not charge students, career centers, or institutions. We do not sell student leads to recruiters. Our business model is affiliate disclosure on certain financial product guides, fully disclosed in our editorial policy.
Wage data from BLS, IRS, and SSA
When students use the negotiation script generator or income percentile tool, the wage data they see comes from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program — the same federal source employers and policy researchers use. The IRS publishes annual federal tax brackets and standard deduction (Pub. 15-T withholding methodology), and the SSA publishes the Social Security wage base and FICA contribution rates each October for the following January. Updated annually each April.
We publish the BLS, IRS, and SSA data integration in detail at/methodology/data-freshness/and the raw source list at/sources/.
For federal overtime compliance, the FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act) thresholds are tracked — current DOL rule sets the salary-level test at $844 per week ($43,888 annualized), with a separate highly-compensated threshold at $151,164.
Embed in your career center website
Drop a single iframe into your Handshake, Symplicity, or career center site. The embed is sandboxed and cannot read or write to your host page, cannot set cookies, and cannot follow students across your site.
See all 16 embed widgetsfor live previews, attribution policy, and FAQ.
Frequently asked questions
Is this really free for our students and our institution?
Yes. Every calculator is free, with no signup, no limits, and no tiered pricing. Embedding on your career center website is free. We don't charge students to use the tools and we don't charge institutions to embed them. Our business model is disclosed in our editorial policy and is not dependent on student data.
Do students need to create accounts to use the tools?
No. There is no account creation anywhere on SalaryLabs. Students open the URL, use the tool, and close the tab. Their inputs never leave their browser. This is by design — we built it this way so that career centers and FERPA-adjacent institutions don't have a privacy review to do.
Can we embed these in our student portal?
Yes. Every calculator can be embedded as a single iframe. The embed renders in a sandboxed iframe, so it can't read or write to your host page, set third-party cookies, or follow students across your site. Drop the iframe snippet into your CMS, Sharepoint, or learning management system and it just works.
Where does the wage data come from?
All wage data is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) — specifically the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program, which publishes annual median wages by occupation and region. SalaryLabs updates this data annually when BLS publishes new OEWS tables (typically in April). The data is canonical and free for any use.
Bring SalaryLabs to your students
Most career centers start by linking the take-home pay calculator from their website or student newsletter. From there, you can embed the widgets directly in your career portal.