Compensation & Wages

There are two fundamental different types of wages presented in Lightcast data.

• Incumbent Wage
• Advertised Wage (or Recruiting Wage)

Incumbent Wage

This type of wage is for understanding much people who currently hold this job make. If you want to understand the current structure of pay among all workers use the incumbent wages.

Source: Primarily gathered from government reported payroll data.

APIs - CoreLMI - Compensation

Advertised / Recruiting Wage

This type of wage reflects how much are companies advertising for this role.

Source: Data gathered from Job Postings.

APIs - Postings: Global - United States - Canada - UK

More About the Compensation API

The Compensation API allows you to understand one level below what the Core LMI API provides (wages by SOC) by layering in skills and experience on top of it, by creating a model from Core LMI and postings wage observations.

Details of the compensation model are found here:
https://kb.lightcast.io/en/articles/6957494-compensation-model-documentation

How We Obtain Salaries at Different Currencies

With every data run our teams check currency rates against openexchangerates.org and use those to set the salary.

Common Questions

Occasionally, there are things you would like to know about incumbent wages that we can't answer. For example how much does Company X pay its programmers? That information isn't available but we recommend looking at advertised wage.