Where the data comes from.

The Radford Global Technology Survey (now Aon) is the gold standard for total compensation benchmarking at tech companies. Participation-based: companies submit real payroll data in exchange for aggregate benchmarks. Used by HR teams at most Fortune 500 tech firms. We use Radford-published public summaries to validate our enterprise-tier salary estimates.

Mercer's TRS covers base salary, short-term incentives, and benefits across all major industries and geographies. Published aggregate data and role-level summaries inform our non-US country multipliers and senior leadership compensation estimates, particularly in markets where H1B data is unavailable.

Every employer-sponsored H1B petition submitted to USCIS is a matter of public record. The dataset includes employer name, job title, prevailing wage, and work location — making it one of the most granular sources of real, government-verified compensation data for tech and professional roles in the US.

The Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program surveys ~440,000 business establishments every six months. Published annually, it gives median and percentile wages for 800+ occupations across all US states and metros — the broadest government wage dataset available.

The world's largest annual survey of software developers. Respondents self-report their role, years of experience, company size, and annual salary. Stack Overflow publishes the full anonymised dataset. We use it as the primary signal for developer roles outside the US where government filings are not available.

Levels.fyi collects self-reported total compensation breakdowns (base, bonus, equity) at named employers with offer letter verification. It is the gold standard for senior and staff-level tech compensation at large companies. We use it to calibrate senior IC and management levels.

A collection of community-contributed and academically curated salary datasets on Kaggle. We vet each dataset for recency, sample size, and labeling quality before including it in our index. These fill gaps in roles and geographies not covered by primary sources.

Anonymous salary reports submitted by employees for specific job titles at named employers. Glassdoor's dataset is broad across industries but skews toward US and Western Europe. We use it as a secondary signal to validate medians and flag outliers.

LinkedIn's salary insights and job posting data provide a real-time market signal for posted salary ranges. Where employers disclose compensation in job listings, this data supplements our database median with current market demand. It helps validate that our benchmarks reflect what employers are actively offering.

Indeed aggregates self-reported salaries from job seekers and employees, as well as extracted salary information from job postings. Their published salary pages are a useful cross-reference, particularly for non-tech roles and mid-market companies that are underrepresented in developer-focused sources.

Blind requires work email verification, making it one of the highest-integrity anonymous salary sources available. Compensation data skews heavily toward software and product roles at named tech companies. Useful for validating senior and staff-level benchmarks, and for identifying outliers in big-tech vs. startup compensation.

Payscale collects self-reported compensation data across roles, industries, and geographies with granular cut controls (skills, education, certification). Their dataset is particularly strong for non-tech roles and mid-market companies. We use Payscale public benchmarks to calibrate finance, operations, HR, and marketing role estimates.

The OECD Annual Earnings database provides nationally representative average wages and wage growth indices across all 38 member economies. We use OECD data to build country-level cost-of-labour multipliers for non-US markets — particularly for Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Israel, South Korea, and Japan where other sources have limited coverage.

AmbitionBox is India's largest employee reviews and salary benchmarking platform — broadly equivalent to Glassdoor but with significantly deeper coverage of the Indian market. Salary reports are tied to verified employer reviews, and the platform covers roles from entry-level to C-suite across IT services, product companies, startups, BFSI, consulting, and manufacturing. It is our primary source for Indian base salary benchmarks, particularly for cities like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, and Delhi NCR.

Naukri.com is India's largest job portal by volume, with over 100 million registered candidates. Salary data is derived from job postings (where employers disclose CTC ranges) and self-reported compensation from active candidates. It provides high coverage of IT services firms (TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL) and the broader BFSI and manufacturing sectors that are underrepresented in global databases. We use Naukri data to validate Indian market medians and tier-2 city salary multipliers.

NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Service Companies) is the apex body of India's $250B technology industry. Their annual compensation and hiring surveys cover base salary, variable pay, and increments across roles, experience bands, and company tiers — from IT services giants to product-led SaaS startups. NASSCOM data is participation-based and drawn from HR payroll submissions, making it one of the most reliable benchmarks for Indian tech compensation. We use it to calibrate experience-band multipliers and year-over-year increment trends specific to the Indian market.