Cert Certified exists to be defensible. Every rating traces to a measured, sourced number, and this page is the map from raw job postings and government wage data to the tier on each review. If you ever want to check our work, start here.
We do not rate a certification on reputation or on how it markets itself. We rate it on three facts that can be measured and sourced: how often employers require it, what the closest matching job pays, and where that field is heading. Those three feed the tier, and each appears as a clickable, sourced figure at the top of every review.
There is no single composite score on this site, because a single number would imply a precision the data does not have. Instead each cert is banded on the three dimensions against the fixed thresholds below. Each band is worth points (high is 2, moderate is 1, low is 0), and the three add up to a total out of 6, which maps to a named tier. The thresholds are published here so you can reproduce any rating yourself.
A certification has no salary of its own. It qualifies you for roles whose pay is set by the job, so we anchor each cert to the closest Bureau of Labor Statistics occupation and lead with that occupation median. We use the BLS figure as the headline because it is a large, government-measured sample for a defined occupation, which makes it stable and hard to game.
We also show what job postings actually state, and the two do not always agree. Posting-stated pay comes from a smaller, self-selected set of listings and is often a base figure. The gap is widest for commission-driven roles: CFP advisor postings, for example, showed a median near $77,600, well below the $102,140 BLS median, because posted base pay leaves out the commissions and bonuses the BLS figure includes. Where the numbers diverge, the review shows both and explains the difference rather than picking the flattering one.
One consequence worth naming: several cybersecurity certs (Security+, CISSP, CISM, CEH) map to the same BLS occupation, information security analysts, so their occupation median is identical by definition. On those reviews and in head-to-head comparisons, the posting-stated figure is where the certs genuinely differ, and we surface it for exactly that reason.
Requirement and preference rates come from a Q1 2026 snapshot of private-sector job postings that name each certification. For every posting, a header-aware classifier reads the text around each mention and labels it required, preferred, or merely mentioned, based on which section heading it falls under. Postings are deduplicated by employer and title, and job-board aggregators (listings posted through staffing intermediaries rather than the hiring company) are excluded from the employer lists so the named employers are real.
For most certifications the source is a single-date Indeed snapshot. Because it is a snapshot, it does not split agency from direct postings and does not capture a full quarter of hiring, and every review that relies on it says so. For the cloud and finance certifications we used TheirStack, which returns richer per-posting fields. Sample sizes are stated on each review, and small samples are flagged as such rather than dressed up.
Federal demand comes from USAJobs, the official government hiring site, whose listings include full qualification text. Where a cert appears in enough federal postings to classify cleanly, such as ACLS and BLS, we show a federal lens alongside the private one. Where the requirement is set by a directive rather than the cert name itself, as with the Department of Defense 8140 baseline that drives Security+ and others, the literal cert name is often absent even though the requirement is real, so we report prevalence (a count of postings) rather than invent a required-versus-preferred rate. Where federal data is thin or absent, we suppress the lens instead of showing a misleading number.
All wage and growth figures come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: May 2024 wages from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program, and 2024 to 2034 projections from the Occupational Outlook Handbook. We map each certification to the occupation that best matches the roles it appears in, name that occupation on the review, and link to the BLS page so you can confirm every figure at the source.
No dataset is perfect, and pretending otherwise would defeat the purpose. The private postings are snapshots, not a continuous feed, so they capture a moment in Q1 2026 rather than a full year, and the single-date sources cannot separate staffing-agency listings from direct ones. Sample sizes vary by cert, and smaller ones carry more noise. Mapping a certification to one BLS occupation is a judgment call, since real holders work across several related roles, so the occupation median is the best single anchor rather than a perfect match. Federal prevalence counts are not the same kind of figure as a classified rate, and we keep them visually distinct. We would rather show a smaller, honest number with its caveats than a confident one we cannot stand behind, and we refresh the data as new postings and BLS releases come in.