Understanding Compensation and Wages

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

• "Incumbent Wages"
• "Advertised Wage" or "Recruiting Wage"

Incumbent Wages

How much do people who currently hold this job make? If you want to understand the current structure of pay among all workers use the incumbent wages.

For Incumbent Wages we provide two APIs - Core LMI API (Occupational Wages) and Compensation API.

Advertised / Recruiting Wage

How much are companies saying they will pay currently to get a new employee? If you want to understand what people are willing to pay for a new worker use the recruiting wage.

For Advertised/Recruiting Wage the Postings APIs.

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.