Talking salary with your friends and coworkers remains a persistent taboo — and for good reason. Each employee brings a unique set of skills and abilities to his or her job, and will presumably be appropriately compensated based on their respective backgrounds. Sharing salary information without context leads to hurt feelings in most situations.
But what to do if curiosity has gotten the better of you? Or if you’re about to negotiate a starting salary or raise, how do you find out the going rate for your job? Several websites now purport to remove the veil of secrecy surrounding what Americans earn. (Of course, this being the internet, take what you read with a grain of salt, but these resources are your best bet for going into salary negotiations prepared.)
We’ve mentioned NetWorthIQ.com before (see here), a website where anonymous users disclose their income, age, assets, debts, and other financial specifics. However, the income bracket becomes broader as salary goes up, so there’s no telling whether the engineer from Virginia with a B.A. falls at the top or the bottom of the $100,000-$149,999 range. Therefore for top-paying jobs, it may be of limited use.
GlassDoor.com is another anonymous user-submitted salary resource. You first have to become a member (it’s free) and enter your own salary, company, and job title before you can search its database. But it gives an insider’s look at some of the country’s biggest employers in both the public and private sectors, from Hewlett-Packard to the U.S. Postal Service.
Finally, Salary.com is the granddaddy of income research, including specifics about bonuses and benefits. You can narrow down your search by industry, job title, zip code, your education level, and size of the company. You can even order a custom report called “You Vs. Market” for a more detailed analysis of where you fall on the salary bell curve. The only drawback is the site’s popularity, which means you will be bombarded with advertisements for continuing education and job listings, but navigate beyond that and Salary.com can be a pretty candid look at the pay stubs of others.
