How do I know how much of a salary I can ask for?
Determining reasonable salary ranges for positions can be useful at multiple points during the career exploration and job search process. Salary information can inform your decisions about whether a particular career path aligns with your financial needs and goals, whether you want to spend your time applying for a particular position, and can make you a more powerful negotiator after you’ve received a job offer. This article will dive into sources of salary data that you can use to gather information.
Glassdoor
Glassdoor is a career website where users can search for jobs, organization reviews, and salary information. The information is free to registered users with a Glassdoor account, but an account is required to access salary information. When making an account, you’ll be asked to provide your own salary information as a way to contribute to this resource.
After making an account, salary information will be available under the ‘Salaries’ tab. Here, you can search for job titles in specific locations, and available salary data will be returned. The screenshot below shows the results returned for ‘Scientist’ positions in the Minneapolis-St.Paul area. Results can be filtered by amount of experience and industry, and are grouped by employer (further down the page, not in view on this screenshot). Glassdoor also indicates how many salaries were used to construct the estimates for each employer listed. Salary estimates will be most accurate for position titles with many salary submissions.
US Bureau of Labor Statistics
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics compiles statistics on many different metrics related to labor and employment: demographics, employment numbers, wages, benefits, hours, health and safety, and more! Occupational Employment and Wage statistics are available in disaggregated form by occupational groups and titles. Each page for a particular occupational title (here’s the page for Microbiologists as an example) provides national estimates of mean wage, industry categories with the highest published employment and wages for that occupation and the corresponding mean wage for said industry, and a geographic profile showing data for regions with the highest number of workers in that occupation and highest wage for that occupation. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics also has a ‘Create Customized Tables’ function that allows the user to create their own data query.
H1B Visa Application Databases
The UMN provides access to the H1B Plus Visa Database on GoinGlobal, which is a database containing visa application listings for American employers seeking to hire international talent in the United States. The H1B Plus Visa Database allows users to search using filters like job title, company, year, location. Using the search criteria provided, the search tool returns job title, occupation category, company, location, wage, and year of the visa application. UMN students and postdocs may access GoinGlobal by logging in via Handshake > Career Center > Resources > GoinGlobal > H1B Visas tab (check out this video for more help with navigating to GoinGlobal).
Public University Salary Data
Salary data for employees at some universities is publicly available, which can be useful for those considering employment in a university setting. One example is the University of California (UC) system, which publicly reports salary data for their employees. UC wage data can be searched by job title, employee name, pay range, year, and campus location. The State of Minnesota releases salary information for all state employees, including data for employees of colleges and universities within Minnesota State (not including the UMN). State of Minnesota salary data can be downloaded from their website.
Data from the University of Minnesota can be accessed through the Reporting Center in MyU. To access salary data:
- Log into MyU
- Click the ‘Key Links’ menu on the top left of the screen
- Select ‘Reporting Center’
- In the Human Resources section, select ‘Workforce Analysis’, and then ‘Compensation’
- Select ‘Employee NHBR Job Code Average Salary’
This report contains average and median salary information based on normalized hourly base rate (NHBR), and compensation overlaid with employee years in job code and total years of service, for each level of the HR Department Hierarchy and Job Code for any date from April 6, 2015 to today’s date. The salary data can be filtered by job code, campus, college, department, etc. This document further describes this data report. It is important to note that this report only includes the base salary that the employee receives from the university, and that additional sources of income are captured in a different report titled ‘Employee Non Institutional Base Salary (Addl Pay)’, which is accessible under the same Compensation menu (listed in step 4 above). This document further describes the Employee Non Institutional Base Salary (Addl Pay) report.
Comparable Open Jobs
Current job listings are another valuable source of salary information. Some open job listings contain the salary range for that position, so comparing a position you’re interested in to other similar listings can give you a sense of the current market rate for such a position. Remember that salaries for similar positions vary according to organization size, geographic location, experience level, and other factors, so keep these things in mind when looking for suitable comparison positions. Some locations (like the state of Colorado) require by law that job postings specify the salary level, so looking for similar roles in areas with these policies can be one way to find salary information.
Summary
We recommend gathering salary data from all of the applicable sources that you have access to, and synthesizing across all of this information to determine market rate compensation for a position you’re interested in. It can also be useful to consider salary within the context of geographical cost of living; $100K in Boston, MA is not the same as $100K in Fargo, ND! We like the Nerdwallet cost of living calculator, which allows for comparisons between two cities. Using data to understand market rate salaries is useful for career exploration, job searching, and negotiating, and we hope these data sources assist you in doing so.