Frequently Asked Questions

Account Questions

Q: How do I reset my password?

If you forgot your password or need to reset it, just head to the login page and click the “Forgot password?” link. We’ll send you an email immediately with a link to set up a new password for your account.

Q: I don’t want to receive any emails. How do I do that?

Occasionally, PayScale sends users emails concerning your account and to let you know about our new features. To unsubscribe, go to the “My Account” page and adjust your settings.

Q: How do I update my email address?

If you are a PayScale Insight customer, contact your service representative to update the email address associated with your company’s PayScale account.

Personal users cannot change their email addresses at this time. If you so prefer, you can delete your account completely and sign up using your new email address.

Personal Data Questions

Q: How do I find the pay rate for my job?

All salary websites are not created equal. Tap into the largest on-demand salaries database in the world to understand your earning potential. To do research for some job titles, go to our Research Center. To know what you should be paid, take our salary survey.

Q: Do you display my personal information to other users?

No, none of your personal information, including your name, email address, age, employer, school, or city will be visible to anyone else.

Q: Is my information publicly viewable? Will my employer be able to identify me?

The data in your salary profiles has been anonymized such that there is nothing personally identifiable in your profile. Anonymous profiles are not displayed in the Research Center or discoverable via search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

Q: The data being collected is too specific or not anonymous enough. Is there a way to opt out?

PayScale values user privacy and hides any details that might be very unique as to not reveal your identify; however, you have the option to delete your profile or account completely from the “My Account” page.

Webinar Attendee Questions

Q: I want access to a recording of a webinar or more information about it.

All our webinars are free, and you can access them on our website here.

Misc Questions

Q: My question is still not answered. How can I get in touch with you?

PayScale will love to hear from you. Please contact us at questions@payscale.com.

Compensation Terms Glossary

Base Pay or Base Salary – The fixed compensation that an employee receives on a regular interval.

Base Rate – Wage rate for work performed during a unit of time, most commonly expressed as an hourly rate. It may, however, be expressed as an amount per day, week, month, or year. Does not include overtime rates.

Benchmark Job – A job commonly found in the market, used to compare an organization’s jobs with pay in the market. A benchmark job exists across a variety of companies and in a variety of industries. It allows an organization to evaluate pay against other companies with a shared point of comparison.

Compensable Factors – The details about a job that influence how the job is paid. The most common compensable factors include years of experience and education. Other important factors include skills, certification requirements, management responsibilities and travel percentage, as well as details about the market such as industry and organization size.

Median – The data point that is in the exact middle (higher than 50% of all data points) in the sample when ordered from low to high. The median is also known as the 50th percentile.

Percentile – The data point that is higher than x% of all data points in the sample, when ordered from low to high. For example, the 25th percentile is higher than 25% of all other data in the sample.

Range Midpoint – The exact middle of the salary range, equidistant to the range minimum and range maximum. Ideally, the range midpoint is aligned to the market value of the jobs in the salary range.

Salary Ranges – The upper and lower limits of compensation, typically including a minimum, midpoint and maximum.

Total Cash Comp (TCC) – Employee’s compensation value that includes both base salary plus allowances (Guaranteed Cash) and variable pay including incentive payouts, bonuses, commissions and cash profit sharing.

Variable Pay – Compensation that is paid to employees as an incentive or bonus. Variable pay is typically based on the performance of an individual or group, or the performance of the company as a whole.