Explore Salary Offers

Base salary, which is the guaranteed cash you are paid for the year. A performance bonus, which is usually a target percentage that varies with company and individual results. Equity, granted as shares or options that vest over time. A sign-on bonus, which is a one-off payment made near your start date. And benefits, which have real value but are rarely counted in a headline number.

Each offer in this list breaks those components out separately, which is the only way to compare two packages honestly.

Base salary is one line. Total compensation adds bonus, equity, and any sign-on payment, so it is usually a much larger number and a much less certain one.

The difference matters most when negotiating, because an employer quoting base salary and a candidate quoting total compensation are talking about different things and will appear to disagree about value when they do not.

A grant is a quantity of shares or options awarded when you join or at a review, and it becomes yours gradually over a vesting period rather than immediately. A common arrangement spreads vesting across several years, sometimes with a cliff at the start, meaning nothing vests until you reach that date and a chunk vests at once when you do.

The vesting schedule attached to each offer in this list is worth reading alongside the amount, because the same grant value delivers very differently depending on how long you have to stay to receive it.

A refresh, sometimes called a top up or a stock refresher, is a new grant made after you have joined, typically at a performance or compensation review. It vests on its own schedule, so over time you accumulate several overlapping grants.

Refreshes matter because an initial grant vesting over a few years will eventually run out. Whether refreshes are routine determines whether your compensation holds up in year four or falls off a cliff, and it is a fair question to ask before accepting.

Count it, but not as cash. A grant is a value at a point in time that then depends on the share price when it vests, so the amount you eventually receive can be higher or lower. For private companies it also depends on whether the shares ever become liquid.

A practical approach is to compare offers twice: once with equity at its stated value, and once with it heavily discounted. If an offer only wins in the first comparison, you are being paid in optimism.

Level is the largest factor, because the band the offer is drawn from is set by level rather than by title. Location is next, since bands are normally set per market. Then timing, because grant values reflect the share price on the date they were made.

Individual negotiation and competing offers explain much of the remainder. This is why a single data point should never be treated as the going rate for a role.

Read the level and location first, because they determine which band the offer came from. Then read the date, since the market and the share price both move. Only then look at the total.

After that, decompose it: how much is guaranteed cash, how much is contingent on performance, how much depends on a share price, and how much is a one-off sign-on payment that will not repeat next year.

Treat it as indicative rather than authoritative. Self-reported data tends to skew toward people who are pleased with their outcome, and coverage for less common roles or locations can be thin.

The way to use it well is in aggregate: look for consistency across several records at the same company, level, and location, and ignore isolated extremes in either direction.

Compensation bands are normally set per market, reflecting the local cost of hiring that skill and local competition for it. The same role and level can therefore carry very different figures in different cities and countries.

For remote roles, ask which market the employer anchors pay to. Some pay a single band everywhere, others pay the band for where you live, and the gap between those policies can be larger than anything you win by negotiating.

Use several comparable records, not one. Filter to the same company where possible, or at least the same level and market, and present the range rather than the maximum. Then explain where you sit in that range based on scope you can evidence.

Avoid quoting an outlier. If your figure comes from a package that reflected an unusual competing offer or a share price spike, the employer only has to point that out once for the rest of your case to lose credibility.

No. A sign-on bonus is a one-off payment, so it inflates your first year total and does not repeat. Employers often use it to bridge a gap they cannot close in base pay or to offset equity you are leaving behind.

When comparing offers, calculate the second year total as well as the first. Two packages that look identical in year one can diverge sharply once the sign-on payment drops out.

This page shows individual reported offers with base, bonus, and equity broken out, attached to a company, role, level, and date.

The salaries directory shows role level data: what a job title pays on average, the usual range, and how pay develops with experience across hundreds of careers. Use the directory to find the right ballpark and this page to see what specific packages actually looked like.