How the Premium Data Differs from the Free Data

The data in Salary.com's premium products (e.g.—the Job Valuation Report) is fully scoped. This means the underlying survey data for a given benchmark job has been segmented to reflect pay practices specific to various locations, company sizes, and industries. These are factors known to strongly affect pay and are essential when making professional salary decisions for a given job.

Further, the Job Valuation Report may be used to account for differences in estimated market value arising from personal attributes such as years of experience, performance, education, and other compensable factors known to have some influence on an individual's pay.

In contrast, the HR Salary Wizard's free answers are based on salary values averaged across survey responses from all company sizes, all industry types, and all locations, and offer no personal customization. The Salary Wizard applies a geographic adjustment factor based on the city or ZIP code specified in order to give users an initial sense of local market conditions and to give some confirmation that the correct job title and description have been selected.

To ensure comparability between the free and premium products, each Personal Salary Report and Job Valuation Report includes a chart showing how differences in pay arise as data is scoped to reflect specific locations, company sizes, and industries.