Do you think that salary.com is accurate?

[valeriana]

I have been doing a lot of market research regarding my salary and salary.com (based on the exact zip code I am working in) is telling me that I should be making 25K more than I do. It had the exact job responsibilities that I perform on a daily basis. I am just wondering how accurate this is, and kind of annoyed that I am underpaid.

[Sum Dum Gai]

It looks pretty accurate for my area and job. I also need to get off my butt and switch jobs soon. I'm near the front edge of the bell curve for my job and area, which means I'll need to jump soon to keep my pay growing.

[gooddecisions]

My position isn't listed, but an HR person told me once that salary.com inflates the salaries to encourage people to use their job searching/posting features. For example, if you're a project manager making 60K then salary.com suggesting 80K is the average salary would make you post for their listings.

I just read something similar on a yahoo article: shine.yahoo.com/channel/life/22-secrets-hr-won-t-tell-you-about-getting-a-job-2461178/

.....18. “There’s one website that drives all HR people crazy: salary.com. It supposedly lists average salaries for different industries, but if you look up any job, the salary it gives you always seems to be $10,000 to $20,000 higher than it actually is. That just makes people mad.” –HR director at a public relations agency....

[Waffle]

Oh, boy, I am so overpaid. My salary came in at $18,000 a year more than the salary.com average for my job title and location.

[thyme4change]

The mean salary for my job, my area is only $1k off from my salary. I have more experience than the job description listed - so, maybe, I could make a case for me being underpaid. I think in a lot of salary negotiating you can always make a case why one person should be paid more or less for essentially the same job. But $25k seems like an excessive difference.

[bean29]

I think it is really hard to tell. A real weakness is that it does not list salary + benefits. For my current position I adjusted my current title to what I think it would be in another company. There are three general descriptions for my field almost all are very similar, with varrying degrees of independence. I would not say it is high. Maybe people fail to do what I did and say well this is a small company and I do this but not that etc. But then again my benefits are definately light what they would be at a larger company and they have no analysis of that.

DH is an insurance agent. He is way off the top of the scale they have. But at least 50% of insurance agents are independent contractors and they have no mention of how office expenses are handled. If you are an independent contractor you get no insurance benes, so like I said when I look at their numbers here I really question what they are measuring. DH's 1099 compensation is about double his Schedule C Net income.

[TrixAre4Kids]

core salary was $1k off. When you include my benefits including pension, 401k, health/life/disability insurance, 7 weeks of pto, they undershot it a great deal.

[swamp]

I put in my zip code and got "location not found." Apparently I do not exist.

[Deleted]

It is high by about 100% for me with my title.

[jd2005]

Hit it right on the nose for median salary...(well off by $600, but close enough)

[illinicheme]

I put in my title and my zip code and it gave me a ton of pages to scan through, none of which were my title on the first three pages. I'm too lazy to scan through the rest.

[midjd]

I have kind of a specific job so I wasn't sure what a good comparison title would be... though it is heartening to know I could be making $120K as an "entry-level attorney" in a mid-size firm. No way is that accurate.

Are they using mean, median, mode?

[kgb18]

It seems pretty accurate for my job in my area.

[973beachbum]

Wow that was accurate for our area. DH's job came with in 75 bucks. I wasn't expecting it to be that accurate.