How the hiring difficulty score is built

The market difficulty score on these pages is a public ranking of government statistics for one occupation in one metro. A ReqRadius report's Hire-Difficulty Index also uses the employer's offer and days open, which these pages leave out.

Who gets a page

Roles: the 25 healthcare occupations with the most national employment in OEWS May 2025. Healthcare means SOC major groups 29 and 31, plus the extra SOC codes in the engine healthcare list. Titles containing "All Other" are residual bins and are left off.
Metros: the 80 metropolitan areas with the most OEWS employment in SOC major groups 29 and 31. The principal state has to be one of the 50 states or DC. Puerto Rico is outside the set because this JOLTS extract has no Puerto Rico series. The next state or DC metro takes that slot.
A pair is published only when the metro prints a median wage, a location quotient, and at least the 25th or the 75th percentile, and the state and the U.S. both print a median for that occupation.

Grid size 2,000. Published 1,953. Omitted 47. A pair can miss more than one cell, so the tallies below can add up past the omitted count.

OEWS has no metro row for that occupation: 25 pairs
metro median wage unpublished: 4 pairs
location quotient unpublished: 15 pairs
metro 25th and 75th percentiles both unpublished: 4 pairs
state median wage unpublished: 10 pairs

The score

Three components, each from 0 to 10, averaged and shown to one decimal (round half up). Bands: under 4.0 Standard, 4.0 to 6.9 Elevated, 7.0 and above Hard.

For a value x in a reference list of n numbers, the component is 10 × (count of list values below x, plus half of one less than the number of ties) ÷ (n − 1). Ties share the middle of their run. The lowest input on a "higher is harder" list scores 0 and the highest scores 10.

Component	Input	Direction	Reference list
Local supply	OEWS location quotient, May 2025	Lower quotient, higher score	Every published role × metro page (1,953)
Statewide openings rate	JOLTS total nonfarm openings rate, December 2025	Higher rate, higher score	50 states and DC (51)
Statewide hiring pace	Openings level ÷ hires level × 365.25 ÷ 12, December 2025, total nonfarm	More days, higher score	50 states and DC (51)

Worked from this build: Registered Nurses in Chicago, IL. Location quotient 1.02 → component 4.6. Openings rate 3.3% → component 0.9. Hiring pace 28.3 days → component 0.2. Average 1.9, band Standard.

JOLTS, named plainly

State pages use the December 2025 total-nonfarm series: every industry in the state, one figure for every role in that state. The U.S. comparison on those pages is the December 2025 total-nonfarm rate of 4.0% and a U.S. hiring pace of 37.8 days, the same month.

The national total-nonfarm series in this file also has a July 2026 openings rate of 4.4%. Pages keep that later month off the state comparison.

National health care and social assistance (JOLTS industry 620000) openings rate: 5.1% in December 2025 and 5.7% in July 2026. That series is national. It is kept off the score because this file has it for the U.S. only.

Workplace counts

employers.json is a CMS NPPES organization extract retrieved September 28, 2026, 17,511 records. Kinds on file: clinics, home health, hospitals, pharmacies, physical therapy, rehabilitation, skilled nursing. The file's own note describes a city snapshot for Oklahoma and Texas, from queries in: Edmond, OK, Lawton, OK, Norman, OK, Oklahoma City, OK, Tulsa, OK, Arlington, TX, Austin, TX, Dallas, TX, Fort Worth, TX, Houston, TX, San Antonio, TX.

A record counts toward a metro when its practice ZIP maps through the Census ZCTA-to-county file to a county, and that county's CBSA is the metro. 322 records had a ZIP that did not land on a metro county, and those records are in no metro total.

The count is printed only for metros that contain one of the queried cities. Other metros say the extract stops there. On the role page the card is labeled “Healthcare workplaces in the metro (all provider types).” That figure is every provider type in the file, and it is the same number for every role in the metro. It is records on file, including inside Oklahoma and Texas, and it is not a count of workplaces for the occupation on the page.

Wording rules

The opening summary changes sentence by sentence with the figures. A median is called within 3 percent of another median when the ratio is between 0.97 and 1.03. An openings rate is called near the U.S. rate when it is within 0.15 percentage points, and a hiring pace is called near when it is within 1.5 days. Those bands are wording rules. The cards print the exact figures either way.

Sources: BLS OEWS (May 2025), BLS JOLTS (observations 2024–2026 in this extract), NPPES. A citation names the source.