Every salary guide you have ever read has the same problem. Someone surveyed a group of employers, asked what they pay, waited for responses, cleaned the data, designed a PDF, and published it. By the time you read the number, it is a year old and it reflects what people were willing to say they pay rather than what they actually posted. We built ours differently, because we had a better source sitting in front of us.
See where you actually sit
The guides are free and there is no form to fill in: softwareplacement.com/salary-guides
If you want to know which specific roles you match and what they pay, our Instant Match tool reads your resumé and scores you against every open position we are recruiting for. It takes about a minute, there is no sign-up, and you get your matches immediately: softwareplacement.com/careers
And if the honest answer is that you are underpaid in your current role, that is worth knowing too. It is a great deal easier to fix while you are employed than after you are not.
Software Placement Group has been placing sales, technology, healthcare, legal, finance, and manufacturing professionals since 1994, with over $3 billion in candidate contributions and $500 million in total candidate compensation secured. Our clients interview 86% of the candidates we present.
Where our numbers come from
Software Placement Group is recruiting for roughly 1,500 open positions at any moment. A large share of those postings publish a base salary range. That is not a survey response or an estimate. It is what a company committed to in writing, this week, to attract a candidate.
So our salary guides are calculated directly from those live postings:
- We take the midpoint of each posted range
- We report the median, not the average, so one outlier cannot distort the picture
- We show the 25th to 75th percentile, which is where most offers actually land
- We break it down by city, wherever we have at least three live roles in that market
- Roles without a published salary are excluded entirely
When a role fills, it drops out. When a new one opens, it goes in. The numbers move because the market moves.
Read the median, not the maximum
The single most common mistake candidates make with salary data is anchoring on the top of the range.
If a guide says a role pays $140,000 to $220,000, the $220,000 is real, but it belongs to someone with more scope than the role you are interviewing for: a bigger team, a larger territory, a more complex product, or a market with a higher cost of living. The median is the honest number. It is the point where half the roles pay more and half pay less, and it is the right anchor for a conversation about your own offer.
The 25th to 75th percentile band is the more useful figure still. That is where roughly half of all offers sit. If you are being offered something inside that band, you are being paid normally. If you are below the 25th percentile, you have a specific, defensible reason to ask for more.
These are base salaries only
This matters enormously and most guides blur it.
Every figure in our guides is base salary. Bonus, commission, and equity sit on top. In sales roles, on-target earnings are often close to double the base, so a $120,000 base in an account executive role may represent $240,000 in total compensation when quota is met. In executive roles, equity can eventually exceed everything else combined.
So when you compare two offers, compare like with like. Base against base, then total against total. An offer with a lower base and a real equity grant at a growing company is not automatically the worse deal, and an offer with a higher base and no upside is not automatically the better one.
What actually moves your number
After thirty years of placing people, four things move base pay more than anything else:
Scope, not years. Team size, quota, budget, territory, patient load, caseload, or plant headcount moves pay far more than an extra three years of experience. A manager running a $40 million site is paid for the site, not the tenure.
Location, but less than it used to. The city tables in each guide show the spread between markets. Remote roles are generally benchmarked to a national range rather than the highest-paying metro, which is worth knowing before you assume a remote offer should match a San Francisco number.
Company stage. Growth-stage companies often pay below the top of the range on base and weight the package toward equity and bonus. Established companies do the reverse. Neither is wrong; they are different bets.
Scarcity of your specific combination. Not your title, your combination. A quality manager is common. A quality manager who has taken a plant through an IATF audit and speaks Spanish is not. The second one names their number.
How to use this in a negotiation
Three sentences, delivered calmly, do more than any amount of posturing:
“Based on current postings for this role in this market, the median base is around $X, with most roles falling between $Y and $Z. Given [the specific scope of this role], I was expecting to be in the upper part of that band. Is there flexibility?”
That works because it is verifiable, it is specific to the market rather than to your personal circumstances, and it gives the employer a range to move within instead of a demand to accept or refuse.
What does not work is naming a number based on what you need, what a friend earns, or what you saw on a site that aggregates anonymous self-reported figures from six years ago.
