The higher or lower game for salaries

Two jobs, one pay slip each

Each round deals six pairs of jobs, and you pick the one with the higher median pay in the US. The moment you answer, both figures appear on the slips in red pen. Nothing is timed, so take as long as a hard pair needs.

Check the pen note on the start panel before you press Daily or Solo. Budget cuts asks for the job that pays less. A solo round can also be Head office only, with business, finance, tech, law and office jobs. Or it can be Close calls, where the higher pay is less than 30% above the lower.

Scoring a run

Every right pick earns 100 points. A run adds 20 for each right pick before it, so the second in a row earns 120 and the fifth earns 180. A wrong pick scores nothing and resets the run, and six in a row score 900.

Today’s six pairs are the same for every player, and they change at midnight in your time zone. A solo round deals six more pairs whenever you like.

Titles that say nothing about the pay

Logistician, actuary and switchboard operator share the bank with CEO and bartender. A title can hide the job, and the pay with it. Real or fake job titles asks which titles an employer handed out and which we made up. The funny job titles list puts the plain job under each one, and the job title generator makes up new ones.

Real medians from May 2025

Every figure is the median yearly pay for that job across the US in May 2025. Half the people doing it earned more and half earned less. A few giant salaries drag an average up but barely move a median, which is why the game uses the median.

The figures come from a national survey of employers, so self-employed workers are not in them. For most jobs the yearly figure is the hourly rate times 2,080 hours. Teachers, pilots and flight attendants are paid by the year and don’t work 2,080 hours, so theirs is the yearly figure employers report.

Why no pair is a coin toss

The higher pay in a pair is always at least 10% above the lower one. The 200 jobs in the game could make 19,900 pairs, and 2,043 of them are closer than that, so those never come up. Survey figures have a margin of error, and a smaller gap could be noise.

How the week gets harder

Each pair is graded by the percent gap between the two pays, so $40,000 against $44,000 counts as close as $400,000 against $440,000. On a Monday, four of the six pairs have one job paying at least 75% more. Friday has two pairs within 30% of each other, and the weekend has one. The jobs get less familiar toward Friday too.