Disclosure
Who pays us, and what it can and cannot buy
Every commercial relationship this site holds is listed here. If a relationship is not on this page, it does not exist.
Current status
WhatPays has no advertising partners, affiliate relationships or paid placements at this time. No method records are published yet, so there is nothing for a commercial relationship to attach to. This page will be updated the moment that changes, and it is the first page that will change.
What money cannot buy here
This matters more than the list itself, because it is the part that is structural rather than a promise. Rankings are computed from the effective hourly rate, which is derived from federal tax and census records. There is no editorial override and no database field that a payment could write to.
- Inclusion. No payment causes a method to be added to the database.
- Position. No payment moves a method up or down a list.
- Omission. No payment removes an unflattering method, figure or failure rate.
- The numbers. No payment changes a median, a spread, a failure rate or an evidence tier.
- Silence. No payment prevents us marking a method dead, saturated or not worth starting.
What money can buy
- A labelled advertising slot in a fixed position around the content, never inside a table, comparison or statistic.
- Inclusion in the tools block below a method's data, where the tool is genuinely one the method requires.
- A listing on the demand side, where an employer or platform is offering real work.
In every case the placement follows a conclusion the data already reached. A tool listed below a method is not an endorsement of that method — the ranking above it is, and the ranking was computed before anyone paid anything.
Paid job listings — our first and only paid placement
Employers pay a flat fee to place a job listing on the page for the occupation they are hiring for. It runs for 30 days and then comes down. This is the site's primary commercial relationship and, as of writing, its only one — we carry no aggregated job feeds, no display advertising and no affiliate links.
A listing is not a ranking, and this is structural rather than a promise. Pay figures are computed from federal records — BLS wage data, Census tax filings — and there is no database field a payment can write to. A listing cannot change a median, a percentile, a failure rate, an effective hourly rate, or the order anything appears in. It cannot cause an occupation to be added, promoted or removed. No advertiser is told which occupations rank where in exchange for spending money.
Listings render below the data, inside a block labelled as paid, and never inside a table, comparison or statistic. Application links carry a sponsored link attribute. A listing never appears on a page whose figures it could influence — which, given the figures come from federal records, is every page.
Because we carry no third-party feeds, every listing on this site is one we accepted money for. So every one is read by a person before it appears, checked against our own median for that occupation, and refused outright if it makes income claims, asks an applicant for money, or matches a known fraud pattern. The rules are published in full, and every listing carries a link to report it. Job listing rules and takedowns
Our own products
Where we sell something ourselves — tooling for people already earning, or data access — it is marked as ours. We hold our own products to the same rule: they appear because they are useful after a decision, never as a reason to make one. We do not and will not sell courses, coaching or systems for making money.
If you think this page is incomplete
Tell us. A disclosure page is only worth anything if readers treat it as falsifiable, and we would rather hear about an omission from you than not at all.