Public tables leave your offer out on purpose
A wage table can tell you San Jose pays nurse practitioners $231,560. It cannot tell you what you approved.
The table knew what San Jose pays a nurse practitioner. It did not know what you approved. That gap is the whole job of the intake. No market table contains your offer, and none of them should. The offer is the decision. The table is the briefing you make the decision against.
A nurse practitioner in San Jose earns a median of $231,560. The national median is $132,300. You can read that and still post six figures, or a range borrowed from a cheaper metro, or nothing at all with the word competitive in its place. The table will not flinch. It does not grade the req. A dental assistant in Minneapolis earns $72,370, against a national median of $48,070. A dental hygienist in Birmingham earns $61,730, against a national median of $98,100. Three true rows. Three ways to be wrong if you treat the row as the posting.
What the table is for
Use it to stop a false sentence. "We're already generous" dies when generous means the national median and the city is Minneapolis dental assistants or San Jose nurse practitioners. "Nobody here will do this work" dies when Birmingham has a deep bench of hygienists and a low band. The table is good at those corrections. It is silent on whether you will pay the local median, the lower quarter, or a number you hope no one reads.
It is also silent on the shift, the panel, the modality, and the screen. Two clinics can face the same median and run different reqs. One names the quarter and the work. The other refreshes a vague ad and calls the market broken. Both are "using data" if the debrief includes a wage. Only one of them made an offer.
Don't ask the table to rank your req for you. A single summary number that rolls pay, supply, and growth into one badge still leaves your approved range outside the math. If you can't say the range without looking at last year's approval, the badge won't save the posting.
What you write beside the row
Next to the local median, write the number you will actually post. If they differ, write one sentence on why. Under the lower quarter, you are below the local market, and you should know that before the ad goes up. Near the upper quarter, you should be able to point at the extra scope. Then stop. A paragraph about how hard health care hiring feels is not a substitute for that sentence.
Do this per city. The Minneapolis assistant row doesn't travel to a cheaper metro. The Birmingham hygienist row doesn't travel to Seattle. Consistency across clinics is how the wrong offer becomes policy.
Illustrative story
Three reqs sat in one meeting: a San Jose nurse practitioner, a Minneapolis dental assistant, and a Birmingham hygienist. Each slide had a real median. None had the approved range. The nurse practitioner slide felt expensive, so the range stayed a notch above the national figure and well under the local lower quarter. The assistant slide felt high, so the clinic posted something closer to the country. The hygienist slide felt low, so they anchored on the national median and hoped cost of living would explain it.
All three slides were accurate. All three offers were a different document. They added a line to the template, local median beside posted range, and refused to leave the meeting with that line blank. The tables didn't change. The reqs did, because someone had to own the distance between them.
The table can brief you. It cannot approve the offer.
https://reqradius.com/hiring/methodology/
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