What Is a Salary Survey?

A salary survey is a research study that collects and analyzes data on wages and salaries across different organizations. Employers gather compensation information for various job roles, industries, and locations, then aggregate it to show trends. The purpose is to help employers benchmark their pay against the market — to understand what different jobs pay in different regions and industries. Salary surveys are a fundamental tool for compensation benchmarking.

How Do Salary Surveys Work?

Traditionally, salary surveys operate on a “give-to-get” model. Employers participate by submitting detailed compensation data for a set of benchmark jobs. This includes base salary, bonus, equity, and benefits. Survey providers compile this data, anonymize it, and deliver aggregated reports showing compensation ranges by job title, level, industry, and region.

The process, however, is resource-intensive. HR teams must match internal jobs to survey roles (a tedious, error-prone process), complete large spreadsheets or online forms, and wait months for the published results. By then, the data may already be outdated.

The Traditional Heavyweights

Several established vendors have long dominated the salary survey space:

• Mercer: Offers extensive global compensation data, known for reliability and broad coverage across industries.
• Radford (Aon): The go-to source for high-tech and life sciences roles, with granular benchmarks by job level and geography.
• Willis Towers Watson (WTW): Offers global surveys and industry-specific benchmarks.
• Korn Ferry: Known for its Hay job evaluation system and broad survey coverage.
• Culpepper: Provides frequently updated compensation data with flexible peer group filtering, especially popular in tech and life sciences.

While these surveys are trusted, they share common pain points: high cost, manual effort, delayed insights, and one-size-fits-all data that may not reflect your competitive landscape.

Why Salary Surveys Are a Pain for HR

Here are the most common challenges HR leaders face with traditional surveys:

• Time-Consuming: Gathering, formatting, and submitting compensation data takes weeks of effort.
• Complex Job Matching: Aligning internal roles with survey roles is tedious and often inaccurate.
• Outdated Data: Annual surveys can be 6+ months old by the time you get the results.
• Overly Broad Benchmarks: The data may include companies too large, small, or irrelevant to your business.
• High Cost: Fees for access can range from $2,500 to $10,000 per report or more.

Enter CompTech: Real-Time, Hassle-Free Compensation Data

A new class of compensation platforms has emerged to solve these problems. Companies like OpenComp, Pave, and Compa are changing the game with real-time, software-powered market data that removes the friction of traditional surveys.

These platforms:

• Offer continuously updated market data
• Eliminate manual data submissions by integrating with HRIS or payroll systems
• Allow custom filtering by company size, industry, location, and more
• Provide user-friendly dashboards and visualizations
• Enable instant insights and compensation modeling

Spotlight on OpenComp

OpenComp exemplifies this new breed of compensation intelligence platform. It provides on-demand salary benchmarks without requiring formal survey participation.

Key benefits include:

• Aggregated, daily-updated data from multiple sources
• No mandatory data contribution to access market insights
• AI-powered job matching for accurate benchmarking
• Built-in compensation planning tools, including pay range modeling and pay equity analysis

Instead of waiting weeks for static survey reports, HR leaders can now log into OpenComp and see exactly how their team compares to the market—in real time, with minimal effort.

The Bottom Line

Traditional salary surveys aren’t going away, but they’re no longer the only option. Modern CompTech platforms like OpenComp offer faster, smarter, and easier access to the data HR leaders need to build competitive compensation strategies.

The future of compensation benchmarking is flexible, dynamic, and intelligent. And it’s already here.

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