About & methodology
By the Pay by Role team · Data refreshed November 1, 2026
- Careers
- 27
- Countries
- 17
- Cities
- 418
Pay by Role publishes salaries for 27 careers across 17 countries and 418 cities, shown in each country’s local currency. Data last refreshed on November 1, 2026.
Who publishes this site
Pay by Role is an independent salary-research project. We write original guides on reading pay data, and we maintain calculators and country reports so you can place an offer in context. We are not a job board, a recruiting agency, or an employer.
Editorial questions, corrections, and privacy requests go to hello@paybyrole.com. There is a full contact page, plus a disclaimer on estimates versus advice.
Where the numbers come from
Country-and-job medians are fetched programmatically from public salary APIs at build time. A role only appears for a country when a real source covers it. Our dataset holds 126 country-and-job medians, of which 9 come from U.S. BLS OEWS and 117 from SalaryByRole (for roles BLS OEWS does not cover).
For 187 specific city-and-job combinations we publish observed per-city percentiles published by BLS OEWS metropolitan wage tables. When a source omits p25 or p75, we leave that point blank rather than copying the median into its place. Each page includes original analysis of the local pay band, take-home, rent, and how the metro compares with peers — not only a national median with the city name swapped in.
Country highest-paying lists work the same way: the ranking is the dataset, but the article is written from that country’s mix of occupations, pay spread, and economic context. We submit pages backed by observed data to search engines, and keep modelled estimates out of the index.
Where a metro is not individually covered, we may still show a modeled city estimate: the real national median adjusted by a local pay index, plus a cost-of-living index for buying-power context. Modeled pages are labelled as such and are not treated as primary search destinations. The full source-by-source breakdown is on our methodology page; see also How we source salary data.
Data sources
- countries.dev (GeoNames / CC BY 4.0) — Country catalog + city candidates (population-ranked) and region/language metadata.
- BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (Public domain (U.S. Government work)) — May 2025 national and metropolitan annual wage percentiles for mapped U.S. occupations.
- SalaryByRole (CC BY 4.0) — National salary medians per role (breadth fallback).
- ExchangeRate-API (Free tier) — USD FX rates for local-currency conversion.
- World Bank Open Data (CC BY 4.0) — Consumer-price inflation, GDP per capita, and unemployment for country context.
- Nager.Date Public Holidays (Open data) — Public holiday counts by country for working-year context.
For 21 countries without role-level medians (Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Malaysia, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam), country pages show official national earnings instead, from OECD Average annual wages and ILOSTAT earnings of employees by occupation. Each figure is labelled with its survey, year and currency. Exchange rates for comparisons come from the date shown on each page.