Pay survey data that cleans itself and sells year-round.

Pay survey data is compensation information — salaries, bonuses, equity — collected directly from employers through a survey run by an association, membership organization, or research publisher, then cleaned and published as benchmark tables. Because it comes from the publisher’s own respondent pool rather than a purchased database, respondent-privacy rules govern what can ship.

Industry associations, membership organizations, trade publishers, and niche research firms — the operations behind a compensation survey provider. Running one means maintaining the intake instrument, cleaning every cycle’s responses — outlier removal, smoothing, stratification — and publishing the benchmark tables, usually once a year.

No. Respondents share pay data because the raw file never leaves the publisher. What buyers can receive is aggregate percentile bands filtered by cohort — company size and industry — so no individual response can be reverse-engineered. Encoding that privacy rule into the pipeline is what makes a self-serve tool safe to sell.

Public filings — named-officer pay extracted from DEF 14A proxies at roughly 5,500-company scale — are normalized against the same rules as the survey responses: same job-title mapping, same cohort bands. Two messy sources become one benchmark dataset, and the survey stays the differentiated half of it.

Every cycle the survey collects. A manual pipeline caps refresh at once a year because cleaning is the bottleneck; with the methodology encoded, percentiles recalculate as responses arrive, so the published benchmark never goes stale between annual reports.