The Talent Index is built from real signals — live job postings and official government statistics — not opinion surveys. Every compensation figure is labelled with how it was derived, so you can trust it exactly as far as the evidence allows.
Real individual wages — salary disclosures in live postings (published at 30+ observations, outlier-filtered) plus government administrative micro-records (Brazil RAIS, Mexico IMSS). Census-grade, no self-selection.
Published official statistics (ILOSTAT, INEGI) and community surveys (sysarmy, Stack Overflow). Self-selection is flagged in the source detail and weighted down.
Where disclosure is thin, we anchor to public US BLS occupational wage data, mapped role by role — so every figure has a defensible floor.
Regional figures apply a transparent cost index and seniority multipliers. Every number on the page is labelled with how it was derived.
| Source | What it provides | Tier | Cadence | License |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Live job postings (ATS · LinkedIn · Indeed · community boards) | Hiring demand, disclosed salaries, skills, hiring companies | Reported | Weekly | Public postings |
| Brazil — RAIS / CAGED | Formal-sector wage census by occupation × municipality | Reported | Annual | Open gov data |
| Mexico — IMSS | Registered wages by occupation × region | Reported | Monthly | Libre uso |
| ILOSTAT | Earnings by ISCO occupation × country | Aggregate | Quarterly | CC BY 4.0 |
| Mexico — INEGI (ENOE) | Labour-market indicators by region | Aggregate | Quarterly | Libre uso |
| Community surveys (sysarmy · Stack Overflow) | Self-reported tech salaries by stack × seniority | Aggregate | Annual | Open / ODbL |
| US BLS OEWS | Occupational wage baseline (US) | Baseline | Annual | Public domain |
| Cost-index model | Regional figures via cost index × seniority multipliers | Modeled | Continuous | — |
Hiring demand updates weekly; government wage data is monthly to annual. Every figure carries its own “as of” date — we never imply it is all real-time.
Reported percentiles publish only once a role clears 30 observations, with statistical outliers filtered. Below that, we fall back to official statistics or a BLS-anchored baseline, clearly labelled.
Salary data derived from postings and surveys is less precise than a verified payroll feed. We are explicit about that, weight sources by trust, and prefer government micro-records where we have them.
We work from aggregated, anonymized statistics and disclosed ranges. We never publish an individual’s salary tied to a person.
The live index puts this methodology to work across every role and category.