Method

How to read a band

Every seat is drawn on a shared scale. Solid fill is cash — base to typical. The vertical tick is the number people quote (OTE or TC). The wash past the tick is observed top of book, not a promise. A hollow cash bar means the seat is still market-only. A solid bar means a majority of reports came from a work inbox.

What a number is

Each seat is an estimate of US typical pay for that company and role: base, OTE or typical total comp, and the top of the observed book. Sales seats use OTE. IC seats use typical TC in the OTE column.

Sources, in rank order

  1. Work-email report. We send a code to a company inbox. Only then does a number count as verified. The envelope on a row means a majority of that seat’s sample is verified.
  2. Market composite. Trailing public ranges — filings, posted jobs, published surveys. This is the floor every seat starts from.
  3. Public posts on X. Cited on the seat when we used one. Link goes to the post. Not verified. Never outranks a work-email report.

The score

Authority is 0–99. It is how much we trust the seat, not how well the company pays. Work-email share is the heaviest input. We do not publish the rest of the recipe. 80+ is a seat you can take to a negotiation. Below 50, treat it as a sketch.

What we will not do

No private HR scrapes. No screenshot-as-proof. No selling identities. Only the email domain is public.

Confirm a seat with work email