About & methodology
- Careers
- 77
- Countries
- 40
- Cities
- 409
Pay by Role publishes salaries for 77 careers across 40 countries and 409 cities, shown in each country’s local currency. Data last refreshed on September 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 3009 country-and-job medians, of which 3000 come from OfficialSalary and 9 from SalaryByRole (for roles OfficialSalary does not yet cover).
For 6900 specific city-and-job combinations we publish observed per-city percentiles (entry-level through senior) from OfficialSalary’s public labour-market coverage. Each of those pages 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 concentrate the public search index on major-market city pages plus those country rankings, rather than treating every observed URL as a doorway to the same template.
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. Read the full explanation in How we source salary data.
Data sources
- countries.dev (GeoNames / CC BY 4.0) — Country catalog + city candidates (population-ranked) and region/language metadata.
- OfficialSalary (Attribution) — Per-city salary percentiles (BLS OEWS / OECD / ILO); also gates which cities are kept.
- 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 fully authoritative figures, official national sources can be layered in as additional pipeline adapters — e.g. US BLS OEWS, UK ONS ASHE, Australia ABS, and ILOSTAT for global coverage.