Salary survey providers: compensation survey companies and salary data providers compared
Salary survey providers sell aggregated pay data collected from employers. There are four kinds: traditional consultancies that run an annual submission cycle, real-time platforms that read pay straight from HR systems, aggregator tools that resell someone else's survey, and free public wage data from the federal government.
Below: who the providers actually are, what each one publishes about price, the questions that separate a good fit from an expensive one, and the antitrust rule that changed in 2023 and that almost no buyer's guide mentions. Price a role on the right while you read.
Last updated July 2026
- P25
- $0
- P50 · Median
- $0
- P75
- $0
Suggested posted range
Sample benchmarks derived from public wage data (U.S. BLS OES, May 2024). Early-access customers get live, methodology-documented benchmarks.
Get bands for your whole team
Four kinds of provider, not one market
Buyers usually start by asking which provider is best, which is the wrong first question. The four categories collect data in genuinely different ways, and that difference decides freshness, job coverage, price and how much work lands on you. Pick the category first, then shortlist inside it.
Traditional surveys
Mercer, WTW, Aon Radford, Korn Ferry, Culpepper. Employers submit their pay file once or twice a year, the provider matches jobs and publishes percentiles. Deepest job coverage, strongest credibility with a board, slowest refresh, highest price.
Real-time platforms
Pave, Ravio, Figures, Carta. Data flows from connected HR and cap table systems, so it updates continuously. Best for venture-backed tech where equity matters. Coverage thins fast outside that peer group.
Aggregator platforms
Salary.com, Payscale, ERI. They license or blend multiple sources and wrap them in software with job matching and range building. Convenient, but you are one step removed from the underlying survey and its participant count.
Public wage data
BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics. Free, federal, roughly 830 occupations across about 530 metro and nonmetro areas. No seniority split and about a year of lag, so it needs a documented adjustment before it becomes a band.
Salary survey companies, side by side
Nobody in this category publishes a rate card, with one exception. Every number below is labeled as either a published price or observed third-party contract data, and where there is no defensible figure the row says so rather than guessing.
| Provider | Type | Strongest for | Refresh | Price signal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mercer | Traditional | Multinationals, total remuneration, board-grade credibility | Annual (Comptryx quarterly) | MarketPricer $300 per job, published. Survey subscriptions quote only. |
| WTW | Traditional | Broad industry coverage, large enterprise reward teams | Annual | Quote only, no published price |
| Aon (Radford) | Traditional | Technology and life sciences, equity and variable pay depth | Annual, semi-annual cuts | Quote only. Third-party estimates of $10k to $30k a year for a survey subscription are not published prices. |
| Korn Ferry | Traditional | Job evaluation tied to pay data, executive roles | Annual | Quote only, no published price |
| Culpepper | Traditional | Technology job families, mid-market participants | Annual, quarterly updates | Quote only. Participation usually discounts the subscription. |
| Salary.com | Aggregator | HR teams wanting data and range-building software together | Monthly to quarterly by dataset | Quote only, no published price |
| Payscale | Aggregator | Mid-market HR teams, employee-reported plus survey blend | Continuous plus annual surveys | Observed contract data: average $15,893 a year across 93 purchases; $12k to $65k by product tier. |
| ERI | Aggregator | Geographic differentials, cost of labor adjustments | Quarterly | Quote only, no published price |
| Pave | Real-time | Venture-backed tech, cash plus equity in one view | Continuous | Reported $8 to $20 per employee per month; implementation commonly $3k to $10k. |
| Carta Total Comp | Real-time | Option grant benchmarking against a venture peer set | Quarterly | Quote only, no published price |
| BLS OEWS | Public data | US-only employers who need a defensible, citable base rate | Annual, roughly a year of lag | Free. Federal establishment survey, no licence, no participation required. |
| Wagelist | Public data plus software | US teams under 200 that need posted ranges and pay bands | Annual source, bands rebuilt on demand | $99, $299 or $799 a month, published, no annual contract. |
Two honest caveats on our own row. We do not sell a survey, we build bands from public federal wage data with a documented adjustment, so we cannot tell you what 40 named tech companies pay a Staff Engineer in Austin. If that specific peer-set answer is what you are buying, Radford or Pave is the right purchase and this page is not trying to talk you out of it. The full line-by-line cost comparison sits on our salary survey cost breakdown.
The 2023 antitrust change buyers keep missing
For nearly thirty years, US employers relied on a safe harbor. The 1996 Statement of Antitrust Enforcement Policy said the agencies would not challenge a wage information exchange if four conditions held: the survey was run by a neutral third party, the data was more than three months old, at least five employers reported into each statistic with no single one contributing more than 25 percent of it, and the output was aggregated so no source could be identified.
The Department of Justice withdrew that guidance on February 3, 2023, in favor of case-by-case enforcement. Then on January 16, 2025, the DOJ and FTC issued new antitrust guidelines for business activities affecting workers, replacing the 2016 HR guidance and dropping the safe harbor language rather than restoring it. The new guidelines specifically address sharing competitively sensitive information through an algorithm or a third party.
This does not make salary surveys illegal, and reputable providers still build to the old four conditions because they remain sound practice. What changed is that following them no longer buys you a promise of no challenge. The practical takeaway for a buyer is narrow and useful: ask a provider directly how many employers report into the exact cut you will use, how old the data is, and how it is aggregated. If they cannot answer for your cut, that is a data quality problem before it is ever a legal one. Anything that looks like employers swapping current pay figures with each other, with or without software in the middle, is where the exposure actually sits. Take antitrust advice before joining an exchange.
Why this page mentions it
Wagelist is built on published federal wage statistics, not on pooled employer submissions. There is no exchange to join, nothing of yours goes into a pool, and the source of every number is a public government dataset you can cite back to a regulator or a board.
That is a genuine structural difference, not a feature. It is also why our data cannot name your competitors' pay: the same property that removes the exchange removes the peer set.
Six questions that decide the shortlist
01
How many jobs do you actually need priced?
Count them. Most companies under 200 people have 20 to 40 distinct benchmarkable jobs, not hundreds. At that number, per-job pricing beats a subscription and public data beats both.
02
How many employers report into your cut?
A survey with 3,000 participants can still have nine companies in your industry, size band and metro. Ask for the participant count of the exact cut you will use, in writing, before you sign.
03
What is the reference date?
Not the publication date. Data collected in March and published in October is seven months old on day one, and older than that by the time you use it in a spring merit cycle. Age it forward and document what you added.
04
Do you have to submit data to get data?
Participation usually cuts the price and sometimes gates access entirely. It also means preparing a clean pay file on the provider's job codes, which is real work for a team that does not have a compensation analyst.
05
Does the contract escalate?
Multi-year survey contracts commonly carry an annual uplift in the 3 to 7 percent range. Price the third year, not the first, and ask what happens to access if you stop participating.
06
What are you going to do with it?
Posting a compliant range needs a defensible number and an audit trail. Winning a bidding war for a Staff Engineer needs a named peer set. These are different purchases and buying the wrong one is the most common expensive mistake.
Which provider type fits which company
| Company profile | What is actually driving the purchase | Sensible choice |
|---|---|---|
| 10 to 50 US employees, first posted-range law | A compliant, good-faith range for each open role, defensible if challenged | Public wage data plus a documented adjustment |
| 50 to 200, building a first structure | Consistent midpoints across departments so offers stop being negotiated blind | Public data plus band software, or per-job pricing for the 10 hardest roles |
| Venture-backed tech, heavy equity | Cash and equity benchmarks against a named, comparable peer set | Radford, Pave or Carta Total Comp |
| 200 to 1,000, multi-state | Geographic differentials and a survey a board will accept without argument | A traditional survey, often two, blended |
| Multinational | One methodology across countries, total remuneration not just base | Mercer TRS or WTW |
| Nonprofit or public sector | Board-defensible pay with a published, auditable source | Public wage data, plus a sector survey if one exists |
The pattern in that table is worth stating plainly. Survey depth is worth paying for when your problem is competitive positioning against known rivals. When your problem is producing a number you can defend to a regulator, a candidate or a board, provenance matters more than peer-set precision, and a free federal dataset has better provenance than a proprietary one. Our small business and nonprofit pages walk through both cases.
A survey is an input, not an answer
The most common post-purchase disappointment is discovering that the data does not tell you what to pay anyone. It tells you what a defined job paid at a reference date across a set of participants. Turning that into a number you can put in a job ad takes four more steps, and they are the same steps whatever you bought.
Step 1
Match on content
Your "Marketing Ninja" maps to a survey job by what the person does, not by title. A bad match is the single largest source of error, and it is invisible afterwards. Full method on market pricing a job.
Step 2
Pick the cut
Industry, revenue or headcount band, and geography. Narrow the cut until the participant count gets thin, then stop. One cut, chosen in advance, applied consistently.
Step 3
Age it forward
Add a documented annual movement from the reference date to today. Write down the figure you used and why, because that note is what makes the range defensible a year later.
Step 4
Build the range
Set the midpoint from the aged market rate, then a spread around it. See how wide a range should be and the salary structure that holds them all.
None of those four steps get easier because you spent more on the source. That is worth weighing when a quote comes back at five figures: you are buying better inputs, not fewer steps. If you want the steps automated rather than the inputs upgraded, that is what salary band software is for, and the compensation management software roundup compares the platforms that do it.
What a posted-range law asks your data to prove
A dozen US states now require a good-faith pay range in job postings. None of them require you to buy a salary survey. What they require is that the range is one you genuinely intend to pay within, and in practice that means being able to show how you arrived at it. A cited public dataset with a written adjustment does that. So does a purchased survey. An unsourced number someone picked does not, and that is the actual compliance gap most small employers have.
California
Pay scale in every posting at 15 or more employees.
New York
Good-faith range on every advertised role at four or more employees.
Washington
Fifteen employees counted globally, and the riskiest state on damages.
All states
The full state-by-state pay transparency hub, with thresholds and penalties.
Salary survey questions buyers actually ask
What is a salary survey?
A salary survey is a dataset of pay levels for defined jobs, collected from employers by a neutral third party and published as aggregated percentiles. Employers use it to price a role against the market rather than against guesswork. The output is usually a P25, median and P75 for each job, level and location.
Who are the top compensation survey companies?
The traditional providers are Mercer, WTW, Aon (which owns Radford), Korn Ferry and Culpepper. Salary.com and Payscale sell survey-backed platforms, ERI sells a desktop assessor, and newer entrants such as Ravio, Pave and Figures pull pay data straight from HR systems instead of running an annual submission cycle.
How much does a salary survey cost?
Most providers quote rather than publish. The one published list price in the category is Mercer MarketPricer at 300 US dollars per job. Observed contract data puts Payscale around 15,893 dollars a year on average and Pave at 8 to 20 dollars per employee per month. Full enterprise survey subscriptions commonly run five figures.
How do you choose a salary survey provider?
Match four things: your industry, your headcount band, the specific jobs you need priced, and how fresh the data has to be. A 60 person company that needs 25 US jobs priced does not need a global total remuneration survey. Check the participant count for your exact cut, not the provider headline number.
What is the difference between a salary survey and salary benchmarking?
A salary survey is the raw data source. Salary benchmarking is the work you do with it: matching your job to a survey job on content, picking the right cut, aging the number to today, and turning it into a range. Buying a survey does not give you benchmarks, it gives you the inputs to build them.
Where can I get salary survey data for free?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program publishes free US wage percentiles for roughly 830 occupations across about 530 metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas. It is a federal establishment survey, so it is statistically solid, but it lags by about a year and does not split by seniority or company stage.
How often are salary surveys updated?
Traditional surveys aggregate once or twice a year, so the data you buy in the fall often reflects a spring reference date. Real-time providers that integrate with HR systems refresh continuously. Public BLS data releases annually with roughly a one year lag. Whatever you use, record the reference date and age the number forward.
Is it legal for companies to share salary data with each other?
Direct employer to employer wage sharing carries real antitrust exposure in the US. The Department of Justice withdrew the 1996 safe harbor for information exchanges on February 3, 2023, and the January 16, 2025 DOJ and FTC guidelines removed the safe harbor language entirely. Use a neutral third party or public data, and take antitrust advice before joining any exchange.
Does a small company need a salary survey?
Usually not a purchased one. Under roughly 200 employees the binding constraint is a defensible range for each posted role, not survey depth across 40 countries. Public wage percentiles plus a documented adjustment for level and location answers that at a fraction of the cost, and it is what a state posted-range law actually asks you to justify.
Early access
See what a band costs before you price a survey
Wagelist turns public US wage data into a benchmarked band for a role and level, with the source and the adjustment written down. It is the cheapest way to find out whether you need a purchased survey at all. Launch pricing starts at $99 per month with no annual contract, and it is published on the pricing page.