ERI salary survey pricing: what the ERI compensation survey and Salary Assessor cost a small company
ERI does not publish a price for its salary surveys or its Salary Assessor software. Every tier on its pricing page, Benchmarking, Compensation Management and Global Compensation Management, is sold by custom quote, and each annual subscription covers a single named user. Individual surveys such as the All Manufacturing Salary Survey are "call to order". For a sense of scale, the surveys that do print prices run from $995 to $7,800 a year for a national manufacturing cut.
That is the honest answer, and it is also why people search for it. You are an HR manager or a controller at a company of 50 to 200 people, somebody has put ERI on the shortlist, and you want to know whether it is a four-figure or a five-figure line before you spend an hour on a demo. Below is everything ERI publishes about how it sells, what the price depends on, what the published alternatives charge, and the questions that get you a comparable number on the first call.
What ERI actually sells, and how each part is priced
ERI Economic Research Institute sells three different things, and people searching for "ERI salary survey" usually mean the first while ERI's sales team will usually quote the second.
| Product | What it is | How ERI prices it |
|---|---|---|
| Assessor Series (Salary Assessor and siblings) | Online database and software. The Salary Assessor lists 19,900 plus positions and 9,400 plus locations; the full platform lists 35,800 plus jobs and 1,100 plus industries | Custom quote on three tiers. Annual subscription, one named user per license |
| Individual salary surveys | Industry reports such as All Manufacturing, 872 benchmark jobs, collected October to March and published each July | Call to order. Participant rate and a free executive summary if you submit data. Free to Assessor subscribers who participate |
| Consulting | Compensation projects run by ERI's consultants | Scoped per engagement |
The three software tiers differ by feature, not by data quality. Benchmarking gets you employer-reported survey data, custom jobs and premiums for skills and certifications. Compensation Management adds job matching, HRIS integration, pay equity analysis, benefits, long-term incentives and pay grade structures. Global adds international market data, minimum wage analysis, executive peer groups and cost of living data. A 90-person single-state company needs the first tier. If the sales call starts at the second, ask why.
What the ERI price depends on
ERI's pricing page asks you to say which features you want and what problem you are solving, then quotes. Its FAQ fills in the mechanics. Each annual subscription is for one user designated by the company, that user must be registered with ERI, and more users mean more licenses bought through Subscriber Services. A credit card purchase gives immediate access; invoice or check goes by phone. So the number you get back will move with three things: the tier, the seat count and the term.
The seat point is the one small companies miss. If your HR generalist, your controller and your plant manager all need to price jobs, that is three licenses, not one, and the quote you compare against a competitor should be the three-seat number. Mercer's manufacturing survey, by contrast, includes three users in its published price.
ERI's own FAQ makes a price claim worth testing. It says one competitor's survey "can cost as much as an annual subscription" to an Assessor Series application. Take that as the anchor: if the single-seat quote comes back far above the published survey prices below, the claim did not hold for your configuration.
The published prices to compare an ERI quote against
These are prices the publishers print themselves, as of September 2026. Most drop sharply if you submit your own pay data, which is the same trade ERI offers on its individual surveys.
| Survey | If you participate | If you do not |
|---|---|---|
| Salary.com CompData Manufacturing and Distribution | $995 a region | $3,495 a region, $17,425 all regions |
| Mercer US Manufacturing and Operations | $2,600, three users | $7,800, three users |
| MRA Benchmark Compensation (Midwest) | $1,199 member, $2,399 non-member, per person | |
| ASE Compensation Survey (Michigan) | Free member, $1,250 non-member | $450 member, $2,500 non-member |
| ERC Wage Survey (Northeast Ohio) | Free | $575 member, $2,300 non-member |
| Payscale, Aon Radford | Not published, quote only | |
| WageList | $99 a month or $948 a year, no quote | |
The full side by side for plants, including the regional associations and the federal medians for 24 production and support roles, is on our manufacturing salary survey comparison. For the general-market publishers, see salary survey providers, and for what salary data costs across every vendor type, the salary survey cost breakdown.
Where ERI's data comes from, and the question to ask about it
ERI describes itself as an outsource of compensation research. Its FAQ says it collects data from thousands of salary and cost of living surveys run by consulting firms, trade groups, associations and government agencies, and distills market values from the combined database. That is a strength for breadth: very few sources cover as many titles and locations.
The same FAQ is candid about the gaps. Where no survey covers a job in a specific city, ERI uses contiguous area wage data together with its own economic studies to report a figure for that location. For a manufacturer in a metro of 150,000 people, that matters: some of the numbers on screen may be modeled from nearby areas rather than reported by employers in your town. It is a reasonable method. Ask the sales team to show which of your jobs and locations are modeled, because that is the number you will be defending when an employee asks where it came from.
Six questions that get you a comparable ERI quote
- What is the single-seat annual price for the Benchmarking tier? Start from the smallest configuration and add, rather than the reverse.
- What does each extra named user cost? Count everyone who prices jobs, not just HR.
- Is the term one year, and what is the renewal price? Get the renewal cap in writing, and note the auto-renewal date wherever you track vendor contracts and their renewal deadlines.
- Does participating in an ERI survey lower the subscription price, or only the survey price? ERI says subscribers get survey results free with participation.
- Which of my jobs and locations are modeled rather than reported? See the section above.
- Does the tier include shift differentials for my hourly roles? ERI's site has a shift differentials section; confirm the data itself is in the tier you are being quoted.
When ERI is worth the quote, and when it is not
ERI earns its price when the problem is breadth. A company with employees in a dozen states, a long tail of unusual job titles, relocations to price and cost of living questions to answer will use most of what the platform does. Nonprofits have a specific reason too: ERI sells nonprofit executive data drawn from Forms 990, which is the evidence the IRS rebuttable presumption rests on (our nonprofit executive compensation page covers that test).
It is harder to justify for the most common small-company case. Take an 80-person manufacturer in one metro with 25 job titles. Most of those titles are assemblers, operators, machinists, welders, inspectors and maintenance techs, and in the federal May 2025 wage data 20 of 24 such roles sit within 5 percent of the all-industry median, so the national number is already public. What that company actually needs is its metro figure per role, a floor, midpoint and ceiling it can post in a job ad, and a regional survey once a year if it wants the local shift differential. A single-seat enterprise database is more tool than that job requires.
That middle ground is where WageList sits: pick the role and the market and get a band and a postable range, built from the federal wage survey and adjusted for your market, at a price printed on the pricing page. If your plant runs more than one shift, the premium sits on top of that base band, and shift differential pay explains why it changes the overtime rate too.
Sources: ERI pricing page, FAQs, Salary Assessor page and All Manufacturing Salary Survey page (erieri.com, read September 2026); Salary.com CompData Manufacturing and Distribution store page and price options; imercer.com Manufacturing and Operations Survey page; MRA, ASE and ERC survey pages; BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, retrieved through the BLS public API. Confirm current pricing with each publisher directly.