How AMMO knows
what it knows.

Where the numbers come from.

AMMO doesn't make up numbers. We pull from sources people already trust to price work, then we line them up so they actually map to the jobs people negotiate inside.

• Government wage data

  The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks what people in every job actually earn. This is the floor under nurses, teachers, mechanics, federal workers, and a long tail of jobs the tech sites ignore.

• Public filings

  SEC EDGAR — the proxy statements and 10-Ks public companies are required by law to publish. Ground truth at the top of the band.

• Levels.fyi

  Engineering, product, design, data. The de facto source for tech pay.

• RepVue

  Sales jobs that pay on commission. Split out by company size so an Account Executive at a 50-person startup isn't getting averaged with one at a Fortune 500.

• Glassdoor

  Employer-reported pay across the long tail of corporate jobs the specialty sources miss. Used for sentiment and breadth.

• Public salary tickers

  State and city pay-transparency disclosures. Pulled and reconciled into the band.

If a job-and-city combo has fewer than 30 data points, we mark it thin and tell you up front. No fake confidence.

How a salary range gets cut.

The middle of the market is the number that splits your job in half — half the people earn more, half earn less. The top quarter is the line where only one in four earn above. Everything AMMO ships is built around those two points, plus the high and low ends of the band.

Cut by city. Working in San Francisco moves the number about 25% above the national floor. New York is close behind. Atlanta sits about 5% below. Every city has its own multiplier, anchored to the federal wage index for that metro. Same job, two cities, two different fair numbers — and AMMO does the swap for you instead of making you guess.

Cut by experience. A junior just out of school doesn't get paid what a director gets paid, even with the same title. We split every role into bands from junior to VP, with the curve shaped by what the data shows for that specific job. A junior nurse and a junior engineer don't move the same way through their bands — so we don't pretend they do.

Cash plus bonus plus the rest. A salary is one number. A real offer has three or four. We separate base from bonus from stock from the long-term stuff so the comparison is honest — and so you can see which lever the company is using to underpay you when they are.

The Stolen Wages math. When we tell you what years of being underpaid actually cost you, we're not waving our hands. The math compounds your gap year over year using the BLS Employment Cost Index — the same series the Federal Reserve uses to track wage growth. Source: bls.gov/eci. Full validation lives in the audit log alongside the underlying data.

What we don't do.

• We don't sell your data.
• We don't share what you tell AMMO with employers, recruiters, or HR.
• We don't store offer details longer than you keep your account.
• AMMO uses AI to help you negotiate. It doesn't replace your judgment.