What you can reuse
Take the charts and the aggregate figures — that is what they are for. But this page draws a line that matters: some of what you see here is ours to license, and some of it very much is not.
Ours, and yours to use — CC BY 4.0
The charts, the aggregated datasets, the Reality Gap and its formula, the specialty comparison table, and the original analysis throughout this site are offered under CC BY 4.0. Use them commercially, adapt them, republish them — credit Career Field Notes and link back. That is the whole obligation.
Not ours to license — the screened source material
The first-person accounts are written by other people on other platforms. This project screens and quotes them under fair-use-style quotation with attribution; it does not own them and cannot pass rights to them on to you. The CC BY licence above covers our counts, our analysis and our charts — not the quoted text itself. If you want to reuse a quote, you are in the same position we are: quote it briefly, attribute it, and link the source.
Not ours to license — government statistics
BLS, HRSA, NCES, Census and CMS figures are US-government works. They carry no copyright and were never ours to license in the first place; we attribute them because that is honest, not because a licence compels it. Where a figure came from a federal source, cite that source directly rather than citing us — our value is the joining and the checking, not the underlying number.
Third-party industry reports
Some figures are cited from commercial reports such as NSI's annual retention report. Those remain their publishers' work. We cite individual statistics with attribution and do not reproduce their tables; you should do the same rather than treating our summary as a licence to their content.
How to tell which is which
Every row of the downloadable dataset carries a
source column. Apply the rule per row: our own measurements are CC BY,
federal rows are public domain, and commercial-report rows belong to their
publishers. There is deliberately no single blanket licence, because a single
blanket licence would be wrong.
Citing a number that will not move
The site rebuilds daily, so a figure you cite today may not match the page next
month. Dated snapshots do not move:
/data/snapshots/2026-08-18/ holds the data as of
2026-08-18, and files in a snapshot are never modified or deleted once
written. Cite the snapshot; link the live page if you want readers to see the
current figure.