How our salary numbers work
A salary number is only useful if you know what's behind it. This page explains where every figure on SalaryGuide comes from, what we leave out, and how many salaries a number needs before we stand behind it.
Where the salaries come from
Our salary data has 2 sources:
- Marketing job ads. Most figures come from the pay ranges employers print in marketing job ads. We collect these ads every hour.
- Marketers who shared their pay. The rest come from marketers who told us what they earn through Add your salary.
Right now the dataset holds 86,000+ salaries.
How a job ad becomes one salary
A job ad gives a range, like “$110,000 to $140,000”. We turn it into one number like this:
- We read the pay range in the ad.
- Hourly, daily, weekly and monthly pay is converted to a yearly figure.
- Pay in other currencies is converted to US dollars.
- We take the middle of the range.
- We round it to the nearest $1,000.
- We take the years of experience from the ad.
We leave an ad out if:
- it is not a marketing job
- it is part-time
- it has no company or no location
- the pay is outside realistic limits for the role and level
- the range is too wide to mean anything
- we already have the same job (same company, role and pay)
Base pay, bonus and equity
Job ads usually list base pay only. So bonus and equity figures come mostly from salaries marketers shared with us. When a page shows a bonus or equity figure, it is based on fewer salaries than the base pay figure above it.
How we calculate the figures on a page
- Median: the middle salary. Half earn more, half earn less.
- Range on a salary page: the 25th to the 75th percentile, so the middle half of salaries.
- Company and location tables: the 25th to the 90th percentile, so you can see how high pay goes.
- “Typical salary range” on a company page: the middle of the low ends and the middle of the high ends of that company's advertised pay ranges.
Every page says how many salaries it is based on. Use that count. A median from 400 salaries tells you much more than a median from 12.
How many salaries a number needs
- We only ask search engines to list a salary page once it has 30 or more salaries. Pages with fewer still show their numbers and their count, so you can judge them yourself.
- In a role's company list, we only name a company once we have 3 or more salaries from it. With fewer, the row is shown without the company's name.
Jobs without a posted salary
When a job ad has no pay range, the job card may show an estimate marked “(Est.)”. We base it on salaries for the same role and experience. An estimate is never counted as a salary in our data.
How often the numbers update
- New job ads arrive every hour.
- Salary pages refresh once a day.
Where job and company data comes from
- Jobs: marketing jobs from company hiring systems (ATS), LinkedIn and Indeed, collected every hour. Closed jobs come off the job board.
- Companies: 146,000+ marketing companies. A company profile combines our own data (salaries and live marketing jobs at that company) with data from outside providers: headcount, team growth, funding and web traffic. Ratings marked “on Glassdoor” come from Glassdoor.
Found a number that looks wrong?
Email support@salaryguide.com with the page link. We check every report and fix the data when it is wrong.
