Free vs. Paid Salary Benchmarking Data for Small Business
BLS, Glassdoor, and Levels.fyi are free but limited. Mercer ($300/job), Culpepper (~$7,400/yr), PayScale (~$13,888/yr) cost real money. When each is worth it.
Is it right for you?
- Look up the role and metro area's BLS OEWS wage percentiles before setting a range, it is free and covers 830-plus occupations
- Cross-check the BLS figure against Glassdoor's crowd-reported range for the same title and city as a sanity check, not a standalone source
- For engineering or product roles with high offer volume, check Levels.fyi, but confirm the company has real submission volume for that specific role before trusting the number
- For office, finance, or creative roles, check the Robert Half Salary Guide as a fourth free data point built from real placements
- Confirm whether your state or city requires a posted salary range before the job goes live, thresholds vary widely by state, from any employer at all (Colorado, DC) up to 50-plus employees (Hawaii), with California, Illinois, and Washington sitting in between at 15-plus
- For one hard-to-benchmark role, price out Mercer's $300 per-job MarketPricer report before committing to an annual survey subscription
- Before signing any paid survey contract, get the exact list of included surveys and data cuts in writing, not a sales rep's verbal description
Quick verdict
For most small businesses hiring common roles in one or two states, BLS OEWS plus a Glassdoor cross-check costs nothing and is accurate enough to build a defensible pay range. Once you are setting formal pay bands across multiple pay-transparency states, benchmarking a role that is thin on free data, or need to defend a specific number later, buy single-job Mercer MarketPricer reports ($300/job) before committing to a five-figure Culpepper or PayScale subscription. Most small teams need a handful of benchmarks a year, not a full survey license.
Free vs. paid salary data: the short answer
Most small businesses do not need a paid compensation survey to set a defensible pay range. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program, Glassdoor, and Levels.fyi all publish salary data at no cost, and for a single-location business hiring common roles, that free data gets close enough for most decisions. Paid options earn their cost once a business needs formal pay-band design across multiple states, has roles the free sources barely cover, or operates somewhere a posted salary range is a legal compliance question and not just a competitiveness one. Mercer's MarketPricer tool prices a single job at $300 with access to over 400,000 benchmarked roles across 140-plus countries. Culpepper's compensation surveys run several hundred to several thousand dollars per report, averaging around $7,400 a year and topping out near $15,500 based on 2025 buyer transaction data. PayScale's MarketPay platform averages roughly $13,888 a year for small and mid-size company deals, with organizations under 500 employees typically negotiating in the $12,000 to $20,000 range.
There is not really a dedicated small-business tier in this market. G2's category page for small-business salary benchmarking software currently lists zero products. HR teams at small companies end up licensing the same enterprise platforms built for 500-plus employee organizations, just at a smaller (and still not cheap) contract size.
The four free sources, and where each one breaks down
BLS OEWS is the most authoritative of the three because it is built on actual employer payroll records reported by more than 1.1 million establishments, not on what workers say they earn. It covers 830-plus occupations across every state and 500-plus metro areas, and it is free to query directly on bls.gov. The catch is timing: there is roughly a ten-month lag between the reference period and publication, the data refreshes only once a year, and the BLS itself advises against using OEWS releases for year-over-year trend comparisons because sampling error can swamp the actual change being measured. OEWS also excludes the self-employed, business owners, and household workers, so a role like an in-house bookkeeper who is technically a contractor will not show up.
Glassdoor fills the gap between BLS refreshes with crowd-submitted and job-posting-derived salary data covering nearly any title and city combination. Nothing about a Glassdoor figure is independently verified the way an OEWS establishment survey is, so treat it as a directional cross-check on top of BLS rather than a standalone source for a formal pay range, especially for a role with only a handful of local data points behind the number shown.
Levels.fyi is the strongest of the three for tech-company benchmarking specifically, and it does more verification than Glassdoor: members can back up a submission with an offer letter, W-2, or pay stub, and a human review team screens incoming entries for anomalies. But it was built around big-tech leveling, and outside FAANG-tier employers coverage gets thin fast, most companies on the platform only have real submission volume for a handful of the roles they operate, not the full spread of positions the platform in principle tracks, and non-engineering roles in particular tend to have fewer submissions behind each median. For a small business hiring an office manager, a bookkeeper, or a regional sales rep, Levels.fyi usually will not have enough data to be useful, the same gap shows up when evaluating whether a platform like Lattice's built-in compensation management module is worth paying for versus benchmarking pay manually.
A fourth free option worth adding to the mix, especially for office, finance, and creative roles, is the Robert Half Salary Guide. Robert Half has published it annually since 1950, and the current edition combines the firm's own placement data with more than 350,000 real-time job-posting data points from Textkernel, covering seven professional fields including accounting and finance, administrative, technology, and marketing and creative. It updates once a year, typically released each September for the following year, so its refresh cycle sits between BLS's slower annual lag and Glassdoor's constantly shifting crowd data, and because it is built from actual placements rather than self-reported figures, it tends to be a closer match to what employers are really paying for staffing-agency-adjacent roles than a pure crowd-sourced number would be.
The paid surveys: what they actually cost
| Source | Cost | Coverage | Notable detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mercer MarketPricer | $300 per job | 400,000+ jobs, 140+ countries | Roughly 50% discount for companies that contribute their own comp data |
| Culpepper | No public price list; avg ~$7,400/yr, up to ~$15,500 | Report scope varies by job families and geographic cuts | Contributing your own data typically reduces or waives cost |
| PayScale MarketPay | Avg $13,888/yr for SMB deals ($12k-$20k typical under 500 employees) | Integrates Mercer, Radford, and Willis Towers Watson data | Insight Lab tier adds pay equity analysis |
| Salary.com | Custom quote, no public tiers | 30,000+ contributing organizations, 20,000+ leveled job titles | Get included surveys and data cuts in writing before signing |
Mercer's per-job pricing is the easiest paid option to test without a long-term commitment: $300 buys one benchmarked role rather than a subscription, and companies willing to contribute their own compensation data back into Mercer's survey typically get roughly half off list price. Culpepper does not publish a price list at all, so what a specific report costs depends on which survey, how many job families, and how many geographic cuts are requested; third-party buyer-data aggregator Vendr puts the average annual spend around $7,400 with a ceiling near $15,500. PayScale's MarketPay sits at the higher end for small businesses, SMB deals under 500 employees commonly land in the $12,000 to $20,000 range annually, though it is also the option that layers in third-party survey data from Mercer, Radford, and Willis Towers Watson rather than relying on PayScale's own numbers alone.
Salary.com does not publish pricing either, and it is worth reading the fine print before signing with any of these providers: the Better Business Bureau's complaint file for Salary.com includes a small-business customer who says a sales director promised the contract included specific private survey data that was not actually delivered once the deal closed [Better Business Bureau, Salary.com LLC profile, checked 2026-08-05]. That is not unique to Salary.com, quote-based enterprise data contracts across this whole category invite the same risk, but it is a reason to get the exact list of included surveys and data cuts in writing before signing any of them. Tools that bundle compensation management as a feature rather than a dedicated benchmarking product, such as the option compared in our 15Five alternatives roundup, generally expect you to bring your own benchmark data from a source like the ones above; they help you apply a number, not generate one.
When free data stops being enough
Free data is usually adequate for a single-location small business setting pay for common roles in a market BLS and Glassdoor both cover well. It stops being enough in a few specific situations. A remote or multi-state team building formal pay bands and running equity analysis needs more precision than a metro-level BLS estimate or a thin Glassdoor sample can provide. A role senior or niche enough that free sources return only a handful of comparable data points is not a role you want to benchmark off a small sample. And increasingly, the posted range itself carries legal weight: California, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, and Washington all require employers to disclose a salary range in job postings as of 2026 [multi-source 2026 pay transparency law trackers, checked 2026-08-05], and the employee-count threshold that triggers the requirement varies widely by state: Colorado and DC apply the rule to any employer with even one in-state worker, New York's threshold is four employees, New Jersey's is ten, California, Illinois, and Washington set it at fifteen, and Hawaii's threshold is the highest of the group at fifty. A range built on thin free data that later looks unreasonable is a different kind of problem in those states than it would have been five years ago. If pay decisions feed into a broader performance and review cycle, see our guide to performance review software for small business for how compensation conversations typically get sequenced alongside annual reviews.
A blended approach that works for most small teams
Start with BLS OEWS as the baseline for the specific occupation code and metro area, it is free, government-sourced, and covers the widest range of common roles. Cross-check that number against Glassdoor and, for engineering or product roles, Levels.fyi, to catch cases where the local market has moved faster than a BLS figure that can be up to ten months stale. When a specific role needs sharper precision, a state with a pay transparency law, a role you are struggling to fill, or a pay decision you may need to defend later, buy single-job pricing rather than a full subscription. Mercer's $300 MarketPricer report is the cheapest way into participant-survey-grade data without committing to a five-figure annual contract with Culpepper or PayScale. Keep a record of which source was used and when for every posted range: if a state agency or a candidate ever challenges a number, being able to show the data and the date it was pulled is the actual defense, not which specific vendor's name is on the report. None of this replaces choosing the right payroll and HR system to actually run pay through once ranges are set, our best HR software for small business roundup covers that separate decision.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Glassdoor salary data accurate enough to set pay for a small business? Treat it as a cross-check, not a standalone source. Glassdoor's numbers come from crowd-submitted and job-posting-derived data with no employer verification behind them, unlike BLS OEWS, which is built on actual payroll records reported by employers [Glassdoor Economic Research data-collection disclosures vs. BLS OEWS methodology, bls.gov/bls/blswage.htm, compared 2026-08-05]. Glassdoor is most useful for catching cases where the local market has clearly moved since the last BLS update, not as the sole basis for a formal pay range.
How far behind the current market is BLS wage data? About ten months between the reference period and publication, and the OEWS dataset only refreshes once a year [U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, bls.gov/oes]. The BLS itself advises against using OEWS releases for tracking short-term wage trends because sampling error can be large relative to the change being measured.
Does Levels.fyi work for benchmarking non-tech small business roles? Rarely well. Levels.fyi's own compensation data guide describes a platform built around big-tech engineering and product leveling, crowdsourced and screened by a human review team rather than pulled from every employer [Levels.fyi Compensation Data Guide, levels.fyi, checked 2026-08-05]. Coverage for any specific company is limited to whichever roles enough of its employees have submitted, so for a role like an office manager, bookkeeper, or regional sales rep, there usually is not enough data behind the number to trust it.
What is the cheapest way to get a real paid compensation survey benchmark instead of relying on free data? Mercer's MarketPricer tool prices a single job at $300 rather than requiring a subscription, and it draws on a database of more than 400,000 benchmarked roles across 140-plus countries [shop.mercer.com]. Companies that contribute their own compensation data back into Mercer's survey typically receive roughly half off that price.
Which states require a salary range in job postings as of 2026? California, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, and Washington all require it, and the employee-count threshold that triggers the rule varies: Colorado and DC apply it to any employer with at least one in-state worker, New York's threshold is four employees, New Jersey's is ten, and California, Illinois, and Washington set it at fifteen [multi-source 2026 pay transparency law trackers, checked 2026-08-05].