How we project a career, and what we won't do.

The Indian school year runs April to March, so October 2026 is in the 2026–27 session. A student in Class N finishes Class 12 in the spring of 2027 + (12 − N), with results around May. Each route then adds its stages at their usual intake months: most degrees start in August, MBBS in mid-September, master's courses around July. Compulsory internships, articleship, academy training or flying hours are counted where they apply.

Example: on a four-year B.Tech, a Class 8 student today could start work around 2035 and a Class 12 student around 2031. Preparation years, a master's, a repeated year or extra exam attempts move the date, and you can change each of these.

Route durations follow the regulators (NMC, VCI, INC, NCAHP, PCI, CoA, BCI, ICAI, DGCA, UPSC, NCTE, UGC).

We only use data we're allowed to use commercially, and we never scrape sites that forbid it. Today that means official US pay data (the Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2025 occupational wage estimates) and official Indian government pay scales (the 7th Pay Commission pay matrix). For private-sector jobs in India there is no public, reusable source of pay by occupation: the national survey's person-level data needs a commercial licence from the statistics ministry, and salary websites prohibit reuse. Until we license better data, those careers show “no reliable pay data yet” rather than a made-up number.

Every projected figure is built from three visible parts:

1. Today's pay at your career stage. Official data mixes all experience levels, so a typical person is placed in the lower part of today's range when they start (10th–25th percentile) and moves towards the middle over about 15 years. A high earner reaches the top 10%. These are stated assumptions, not observations, and many people stay specialists.
2. Real pay growth, in three scenarios. US: 0.53%, 1.13% and 1.73% a year, from the US Social Security Trustees' official long-range assumptions. Indian government pay: 0.0%, 1.3% and 2.0%, where the base case repeats the 7th Pay Commission's real rise spread over ten years.
3. Prices. US 2.4% a year (Trustees' intermediate assumption); India 4.0% (the Reserve Bank of India's target).

Future money and today's value. A salary in 2035 is shown in the money of that year. “Today's value” divides it by the expected rise in prices, so you can compare it with what money buys now. A bigger number later is not automatically a better life.

No hidden tilts. We don't push the central estimate up or down for AI or job demand, because we haven't shown that doing so improves accuracy. We show demand and AI exposure as separate evidence instead.

Every projection has a shaded range that widens with time: ±3.79% per square-root year for US figures. It covers one thing only: overall pay growing faster or slower than our rates. It does not cover the much bigger differences between people in the same job, which we show separately from today's published pay range.

We checked the growth rates against real US wage history: 12 Bureau of Labor Statistics series of average hourly earnings (all private-sector workers and 11 industry groups, data from 1964 to 2025). From every year between 1984 and 2024, we projected each series forward with the same fixed rates and compared the result with what happened. The rates are today's official assumptions, which were set knowing this history, so this is a check of how far constant rates like these can drift, not a clean forecasting record.