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How to Find Real Salary Data for Any Tech Role (Not Survey Guesses)

ForgeApply Team·2026-07-14·5 min read

The Problem With Most Salary Data

Most salary numbers online come from self-reported surveys. They skew toward people motivated to report (often outliers), mix total compensation with base pay inconsistently, and lag the market by months or years. Useful directionally; risky to negotiate on.

The Better Source: What Employers Publish

Pay transparency laws in California, Colorado, New York, Washington and a growing list of states require many employers to publish salary ranges directly on job postings. That created a dataset that didn't exist a few years ago: current, employer-committed base ranges for real open roles.

It has three properties survey data can't match:

  • It's live. A range on an open posting reflects what the company will pay this quarter, not what someone earned in 2023.
  • It's from the employer. No self-selection, no exaggeration, no title inflation.
  • It's role-specific. You can compare the same title across cities and companies on identical terms.

    • How to Read Posted Ranges

    A few honest caveats:

  • Ranges are wide on purpose. Companies often post a band covering multiple levels. The midpoint is a reasonable summary; the top of the band usually maps to the highest level they'd hire for.
  • Base only. Posted ranges rarely include equity or bonus, which can be a large fraction of total comp at bigger tech companies.
  • Transparency skews the sample. Companies hiring in transparency states disclose more, so aggregate numbers over-represent those markets — which is also where much of tech hiring happens.

    • Where to Look It Up

    ForgeApply's salary explorer aggregates exactly this data: employer-disclosed ranges across tens of thousands of live US postings, refreshed daily, broken down by role and metro — for example software engineer salary in San Francisco or data analyst salary in the US. Each page shows the median, the typical range, and the highest-paying companies currently hiring, with links to the actual postings so you can verify every number.

    Using It in a Negotiation

    Posted-range data is most powerful because it's checkable: "Similar roles currently open in this metro have a median disclosed base of $X" is a claim a recruiter can verify in minutes, which makes it hard to wave away. Anchor on live postings for the same title and city, acknowledge the level question directly, and treat survey sites as a secondary sanity check rather than the headline.

    And if you're comparing offers — or trying to generate more of them — the same tailored-application approach that gets callbacks also gets leverage. ForgeApply handles the per-posting tailoring and autofill; the negotiating stays yours.

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