Match the measurement
Total compensation, base salary, offered wages, estimates and job-posting ranges describe different things. Compare like with like.
MAKE THE EVIDENCE USEFULGood salary research
Good salary research
starts with clear evidence.
Use Wages.fyi to understand a pay market, check the supporting sources, and cite a comparable benchmark. Public coverage varies by employer and career.
Read the text guideKeep the cohort intact
Preserve employer, career, location, level, currency, period and sample denominator. Never average source medians or add overlapping sample counts.
Check the evidence
A refresh date describes collection or serving freshness, not necessarily when pay was earned. Read the original source and its disclosed period.
Keep uncertainty visible
Unknown components are undisclosed, not zero. Small or suppressed samples are not evidence of a particular salary. The available records do not describe every employee.
How to cite a benchmark.
Link to its Wages.fyi page and preserve the employer, career, location, pay definition, currency, reporting period and sample size. Add your access date. Each evidence summary provides a Wages.fyi citation and links to its full compensation breakdown.
Offered wages from government filings describe offers in filing cohorts. They do not establish actual employee earnings or total compensation. Published source aggregates can have overlapping populations.
Readable public evidence.
Plain-text views provide selected supported public-source cohorts with citation links. They exclude private contributions and keep the same pay definitions used on the site.
Occupation research, with its own definitions.
The career explorer adds responsibilities, skills and native annual/hourly wage percentiles. Some specializations share broader wage groups. These tables do not supply employment or survey sample counts and stay separate from employer compensation packages. Read the registered nurse career reference in Markdown.
Private industry payroll averages.
The industry pay explorer adds national and state annual/weekly payroll means, covered jobs and establishment counts. These are private-industry statistics, separate from occupation wage percentiles and individual compensation packages. Broad and detailed industry classifications overlap; their counts must not be added together. Suppressed values remain undisclosed.
Text references use /data/industry-pay/ followed by the industry slug and .md, with an optional state slug before .md. Each cites the matching Wages.fyi human page and original official archive.
Endowments and foundation investment teams.
Explore institutional pay disclosures and hiring ranges from analyst roles through investment and institution leadership. Each record keeps its original role, reporting period and pay definition. Public executive disclosures are separate from anonymous salary samples; posted ranges do not establish actual earnings.
Read Harvard Management Company pay research in Markdown, or open any institutional pay record for its full breakdown and Wages.fyi citation.
Use the full context.
Start with the methodology and source coverage. Private records and verification documents are excluded. Public access does not create a new redistribution or training license for source material; original source terms and contributor consent still apply.
Browse careers, employers and locations, or use the salary explorer for more coverage.