How this site makes money

Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you buy something through one, we may earn a commission at no additional cost to you. That is the main way the site is funded.

This page exists because the Federal Trade Commission requires that relationship to be disclosed clearly and unavoidably, and because you should be able to work out whether a recommendation is trustworthy. Every page carrying affiliate links also says so at the foot of the page, not only here.

What an affiliate link is

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Amazon pays us a small percentage of a sale that originates from a link on this site. It does not change the price you pay. We are not the seller, we do not handle your order, and we have no access to your payment details — the transaction is entirely between you and Amazon.

Affiliate links are marked with rel="sponsored" in the page's HTML, the standard Google requires so search engines can tell a paid link from an editorial one, and they open in a new tab so you do not lose your place.

They are searches, not products. Where we link to Amazon we link to a category of item — "merino work socks", not one specific pair. That is deliberate. We have not personally tested the products Amazon happens to rank today, and a specific product link would go out of stock and leave this page recommending something that no longer exists. Telling you what to look for is a claim we can stand behind; telling you which listing to buy is not.

The rules we hold ourselves to

• The commission never decides the recommendation. Where the best product for the reader is one we earn nothing from, we name it anyway, without a link.
• We always name the free route. This matters more than anything else on this page. Several of the jobs covered here are entered through apprenticeships and agency programmes that pay you to train — power-line work and wildland fire among them. Private schools charging tuition for the same careers can be lucrative to refer to. We will always tell you the free or employer-paid route exists first, even where saying so costs us money.
• We do not sell links or placements. No company can pay to appear in a table, a ranking or a recommendation on this site.
• Wage data is never sponsored. Every pay figure comes from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Office of Personnel Management, or a named employer's own published material, and every page says where and when it was taken.
• Safety-critical equipment is never linked. Climbing gear, fall protection, electrical PPE and flame-resistant clothing have to meet a specification your employer sets and be inspected on a schedule. We discuss them and we do not link them, because that is not a purchase to make from an affiliate page.
• We publish what we could not verify. Where a figure is not published — ski resort housing costs, for instance — we say it is not published rather than estimating one.

Other links on this site

Most outbound links here are not affiliate links at all. Links to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, USAJOBS, the National Park Service, concessionaires, unions and training bodies earn us nothing and exist because they are the correct place to send you.

We also link to Keeping It Outside Jobs, a niche job board covering outdoor-industry employers, which is operated by the same people as this site. We link to it where it is genuinely the most useful source for a category of work and not otherwise. You should know about the connection when you decide how much weight to give the recommendation.

Corrections

If a figure on this site is wrong or out of date, tell us. We will correct it and note that we did. That applies to pay data, housing costs, hiring dates and anything else. Contact details go on the site before launch.