Mercer, Radford, Willis Towers Watson, Korn Ferry.
These are the names you'll encounter most when researching compensation data – large global consultancies that have run salary surveys for decades and built strong reputations among HR and Reward teams.
But the compensation data market has changed considerably in recent years.
Traditional salary surveys are no longer the only way to access benchmarking data, and for a growing number of organisations, they're no longer the best way either.
This guide covers the major salary survey providers, what they offer, and who they're best suited to – alongside the HRIS-integrated benchmarking platforms that have emerged as a meaningful alternative.
A salary survey provider (or salary survey company, compensation survey provider, etc) collects pay data from organisations – typically through a manual survey submission process – and aggregates it into benchmarks that HR and Reward teams can use to understand market pay rates.
The traditional model works on a give-to-get basis: companies submit their own employee compensation data in exchange for access to the aggregated results.
This data is then grouped by the salary survey provider into job role, seniority level, industry, and location, and sold as datasets – accessed through a spreadsheet or online platform.
Most large providers update their data annually or quarterly, and the collection and publication process means there's usually a significant lag between when data is captured and when it reaches you.
For a fuller breakdown of how salary surveys work, how to evaluate them, and where they fit into a compensation strategy, read our complete guide to salary surveys.
If you search the term 'salary surveys' you'll come across two types of answer:
Salary survey providers are typically HR consulting firms who offer compensation data as an additional service alongside their core professional consulting offerings.
Here's an overview of the major players.
Mercer is one of the most widely known salary survey providers globally. It's part of Marsh McLennan, a professional services firm, and its compensation work sits within a broader HR consulting practice.
What Mercer offers for salary benchmarking:
Best for: Large multinational organisations in regulated industries – banking, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing – that need broad global benchmarks and have dedicated compensation teams to manage survey submissions and data analysis.
Key limitation: Data is collected via manual submissions and published semi-regularly, so by the time benchmarks reach you, they can reflect pay levels from months earlier. The job catalogue is also extensive – which can make mapping your internal roles time-consuming and prone to inconsistency.
Radford is the compensation arm of Aon, a global professional services firm. It's particularly well known for its technology and life sciences compensation data, and is often the first name that comes up for companies in those sectors.
What Radford offers for salary benchmarking:
Best for: Global organisations in technology or life sciences that need detailed compensation benchmarks across those industries, and have the internal resource to submit and work with large survey datasets.
Key limitation: Like other traditional survey providers, Radford's give-to-get model requires manual submissions and annual data collection cycles, meaning the data you receive can already be several months old. Users frequently describe the Radford Platform as unintuitive and difficult to navigate.
Willis Towers Watson is a global advisory and broking company – the result of a merger between Willis Group and Towers Watson in 2016. Its compensation surveys give HR and Reward teams access to pay data from a large cross-section of global organisations.
What WTW offers for salary benchmarking:
Best for: Large global enterprises that need broad compensation benchmarks across core markets like the US and UK, and prefer working with a consultancy that also offers strategic advisory services.
Key limitation: WTW's survey submissions are manual, introducing the same risks of reporting inconsistency found across traditional providers. Coverage is thinner in smaller or less-established markets – teams benchmarking roles in countries like Estonia, Portugal, or Czechia often find the data less useful.
Korn Ferry is a global consulting firm with a focus on talent and organisational strategy. Its compensation data sits within a broader suite of HR consulting services, and is particularly strong for multinational enterprise clients.
What Korn Ferry offers for salary benchmarking:
Best for: Large multinational organisations, particularly those in regulated industries such as finance, pharmaceuticals, or manufacturing, that need global coverage and a well-recognised data source for senior stakeholder conversations.
Key limitation: Korn Ferry's data is collected via annual surveys, so the same data freshness limitations apply. The sheer volume of data – collected from thousands of enterprises across hundreds of roles – can make it difficult to surface the specific benchmarks you need quickly. Manual job mapping adds time and introduces room for error.
Culpepper is a US-focused compensation survey provider with a strong reputation in technology, life sciences, sales, and engineering. It operates on a give-to-get model and publishes data monthly – more frequently than most traditional providers.
What Culpepper offers for salary benchmarking:
Best for: US-based companies in technology or life sciences that need relatively current data and a well-regarded source for benchmarking technical and specialist roles.
Key limitation: Coverage outside the US is limited. Like other traditional survey providers, participation requires manual data submissions, and the give-to-get model means access depends on your own contribution.
Brightmine – formerly XpertHR and Cendex – is a UK HR compliance and people data platform. Its Compensation Planning product is its dedicated benchmarking tool, making it one of the more established domestic options for UK organisations.
What Brightmine offers for salary benchmarking:
Best for: UK-based organisations looking for domestic benchmarks with a relatively frequent refresh cycle, particularly those already using Brightmine for HR compliance and employment law content.
Key limitation: UK-only coverage. The data is employer-reported and manually submitted, so the same risks around input inconsistency apply. Variable pay and equity are not covered.
Croner Reward is the pay and benefits arm of Croner, a UK HR advisory business that has been operating for over 45 years. Its benchmarking offering is built around a UK-specific employer survey database.
What Croner offers for salary benchmarking:
Best for: UK SMBs and HR Generalists in traditional industries – particularly those already using Croner for employment law and HR advisory support who want pay data within the same ecosystem.
Key limitation: Reports are published once or twice a year, and Croner's own site acknowledges the need for a formula to estimate short-term fluctuations in the interim – an indication of how quickly the data can fall behind the current market. Coverage is UK-only, and the participant base skews toward traditional industries, which can limit relevance for tech or high-growth roles.
Traditional salary surveys were, for a long time, the only way to access reliable compensation benchmarks.
That's no longer the case – and for a growing number of organisations, the limitations of the survey model have become harder to work around.
There are four major problems that come up consistently:
For a full breakdown of the pros and cons of salary surveys, read our guide to salary survey reliability.
A salary survey and a real-time benchmarking platform don't have to be a choice between one or the other.
Bolt, for example, uses traditional salary survey data alongside Ravio – getting broad global coverage from their survey provider, and continuously updated benchmarks from Ravio for fast-moving tech roles and markets where survey data is thinner or slower to reflect what's actually happening.
As Evert Kraav, Senior Compensation Manager at Bolt, explains:
"With a live benchmarking dataset, you are able to build and track what's going on in the market. We don't have to worry about expired or old data or how we should age it. Those questions go out of the window now that we have Ravio."
Ravio also lets you upload your existing salary survey data directly into the platform, so you can compare both sources side by side – or use different benchmarks for different parts of your organisation.
Get started with three free benchmarks, or book a demo to learn more.
These limitations are why new software players have emerged on the market – like Ravio.
Rather than collecting data through manual submissions, these software solutions integrate directly with company HR systems (HRIS, ATS, and/or equity management software) to pull compensation data directly from companies via live integrations.
This means data is continuously updated as companies make changes, so the benchmarks reflect current market conditions rather than a point in time from months ago.
And, because the data comes directly from source systems, there's no submission-related error risk.
Most platforms in this category also apply a defined validation methodology for converting that raw compensation data into reliable market benchmarks – removing outliers, checking for statistical robustness, and publishing confidence indicators so you can see how reliable a given benchmark is before you use it.
Five of the main players you’ll come across in this space are Ravio, Pave, Carta, Compa, and HRDataHub so let’s take a look at them – they’re well worth evaluating alongside salary survey providers.
Ravio is a compensation benchmarking platform built for high-growth tech companies, with particular depth across Europe. It sources data via live integrations with 1,500+ companies and covers base salary, equity, variable pay, and benefits across 50+ countries and 300+ roles.
What Ravio offers for salary benchmarking:
Best for: High-growth and tech-enabled companies, particularly those hiring across Europe or in multiple markets. Also well-suited to organisations that currently use salary survey data and want to supplement or validate it with real-time benchmarks.
Pave is a US-based compensation benchmarking and management platform, sourcing data via integrations from 9,000+ companies.
What it offers: Real-time total rewards benchmarks for base salary, equity, and variable pay, with strong coverage in the US and Canada. Automated job mapping using machine learning. Built-in compensation management tools including salary bands, merit cycle management, and offer letter generation.
Best for: US-based tech companies looking for accurate North American benchmarks. Less suited to companies with significant European hiring needs – European benchmarks rely on US-based differentials, and equity and variable pay data is limited outside the US and Canada.
Carta is primarily a cap table management platform. Its compensation benchmarking product, Carta Total Comp, is built on Carta's proprietary private-market dataset.
What it offers: Real-time salary and equity benchmarks for US private companies, with cap table integration for tracking ownership, vesting schedules, and equity planning.
Best for: VC-backed, US-based private companies already using Carta for cap table management. Equity benchmarks are mature; salary benchmarking is less developed. Coverage outside the US is limited, and outside privately-held companies is none.
Compa is an offers-based benchmarking tool that surfaces real-time compensation data from live job offers via ATS integrations.
What it offers: Real-time offer and equity data pulled from ATS integrations, updated fortnightly. AI-powered job matching and skills-based analysis for pricing specialist or hybrid roles. Built-in offer approval and recruiter collaboration workflows.
Best for: US enterprises in tech, life sciences, and retail that want to supplement traditional salary survey data with real-time market signals from active job offers. Works best as a complement to broader benchmarking rather than a standalone source.
HRDataHub is a UK job ad aggregator that pulls salary ranges from live and historical job postings – updated daily.
What it offers: Salary ranges derived from advertised job postings, updated daily in-platform. Sector and location filters, trend data over time, and exportable reports.
Best for: Getting a directional sense of the UK market or tracking broad trends in advertised pay. Useful as a quick sanity check, but not a reliable foundation for compensation decisions that will face scrutiny – the sole source is job ad scraping so the data reflects what companies advertise, not what they actually pay, and includes historical job ads too, with no evidence of employer verification, statistical validation, or job mapping for like-for-like comparisons.
Regardless of whether you opt for a traditional compensation survey company, or a modern compensation benchmarking software option, it’s important to evaluate each provider for:
How often is the data updated, and how much lag is there between collection and publication?
Stale benchmarks mean stale pay decisions – and in fast-moving markets, even a few months of lag can leave you mispricing roles or losing top employees.
Annual surveys are the norm across most large providers, with some offering quarterly updates. If staying current matters for your organisation, HRIS-integrated platforms that update continuously win over survey-based alternatives.
How does the provider turn raw data into a benchmark you can actually rely on?
A benchmark is only as useful as the process behind it, and if you can't understand how it was produced, it's harder to defend the pay decisions built on it.
Most traditional survey providers are not publicly transparent about this – which is worth probing directly. Ask what methodology they use to validate submissions, how they handle outliers, and whether they publish confidence levels or sample sizes per benchmark.
Does the data actually reflect the companies you compete with for talent — and is it deep enough where you need it?
Benchmarks are only meaningful if it's drawn from comparable organisations – similar in size, stage, industry, and location – and if they cover all the roles, levels, and locations you hire in.
Datasets built primarily from large enterprises in legacy industries may give you a misleading picture of market rates if your hiring market looks very different. And some providers might be strong in the US and major European markets but thin in smaller countries or emerging roles.
Before committing, ask providers to show you the composition of their dataset and the market filters they offer, and ask for sample benchmarks for your specific job titles and locations to test.
How complex is the submission and mapping process, and what support does the provider offer?
Inaccurate job mapping undermines the reliability of benchmarks at both ends – when data is submitted and when you apply it.
Traditional surveys require you to align your internal roles to the provider's job catalogue, which can be time-consuming and error-prone – particularly for hybrid roles or non-standard titles. The level of guidance and tooling providers offer here varies considerably, and it's worth understanding before you commit.
Salary survey data is a starting point, not a complete solution.
If you also need salary band creation, pay equity analysis, or compensation review workflows based on those market benchmarks, check whether the provider's platform supports these – or whether you'll need to manage those separately or in a different platform.
Most traditional survey providers are data-first, with limited or no compensation management tooling built in, whereas modern software providers offer a range of tooling options.
Traditional salary surveys carry genuine strengths – name recognition that helps with leadership buy-in, large participant pools, and broad global coverage.
But the model they're built on creates structural limitations that are difficult to work around: data that's months old by the time it reaches you, manual submission processes that introduce errors, and peer groups that often don't reflect the companies you actually compete with for talent.
Ravio is built differently.
Data comes directly from live HR system integrations – not manual submissions – and is validated monthly by a team of data scientists before benchmarks are published.
That means you're working from current, verified data rather than a historical snapshot, and you can see the sample size and confidence level behind every benchmark before you use it.
Traditional salary surveys | Ravio | |
|---|---|---|
Data freshness | Annual or quarterly snapshots | Continuously updated via live HRIS integrations |
Data collection | Manual submissions – time-consuming and prone to input errors | Direct from source systems – no manual extraction needed |
Peer group | Weighted toward large legacy enterprises | Focused on high-growth tech and tech-enabled companies, with filters by stage, size, and location |
Job mapping | Manual – requires aligning to the provider's job catalogue | Automated during onboarding by Ravio's team |
Benchmark confidence | Limited transparency on methodology and sample sizes | Sample size and confidence indicators published per benchmark |
Compensation tools | Data access only – no salary bands, pay equity, or review tools | Built-in salary bands, pay equity analysis, and compensation review workflows |
Pricing | Typically £7,000-£22,000 per year, with additional costs for custom peer groups or extra locations | From £5,000 per year for a 500-person company – includes benchmarking and compensation management |
The clearest signal comes from teams who've made the switch.
Kim Heckner, Head of People and Culture at FTAPI, explains why peer group accuracy via Ravio changed how her team works:
"Having the customer base – knowing where you get the data from and who we compare against – is very helpful. When I last looked at the list, we spotted companies that we wanted to compare ourselves to. That's very important. We no longer waste time debating which data is right. Now we start from a shared baseline and focus our discussion on the actual decision."
Try Ravio with three free benchmarks for any role, level, and location – no commitment required.
Compensation surveys are structured data collection exercises run by HR consultancies or specialist providers. Companies submit their own employee pay data – covering base salary, variable pay, equity, and benefits – and the provider aggregates the results into benchmarks that participants and buyers can use to understand market pay rates for specific roles, levels, and locations. Most traditional compensation surveys run on a give-to-get model, where access to the data requires contributing your own.
Salary survey data is used to understand what the market pays for a given role, level, and location – and to set or validate compensation accordingly. Common uses include creating or adjusting salary bands, setting pay for new roles, and running annual compensation reviews to check whether current pay remains competitive. The process typically involves mapping your internal job roles to the survey provider's job catalogue, then identifying the appropriate market percentile for each role based on your compensation philosophy.
Traditional compensation surveys are formulated through a structured submission process. Participating companies extract their compensation data from HR systems, format it according to the provider's templates, and submit it – usually once or twice a year. The provider then aggregates, validates, and publishes the results. Validation methodology varies by provider, and most are not publicly transparent about exactly how they clean data, handle outliers, or produce statistically robust benchmarks from the submissions they receive.
There's no universal answer – the right provider depends on your organisation's size, location, industry, and what you need the data to do. For large global enterprises in regulated industries, Mercer, Radford, or Willis Towers Watson are established options. For UK-focused organisations, Brightmine or Croner may be more relevant. For high-growth or tech companies that need current, peer-relevant data, HRIS-integrated platforms like Ravio are increasingly the stronger choice – or a meaningful complement to traditional survey data.
Traditional salary survey subscriptions typically cost between $10,000 and $30,000 (£7,000-£22,000) per year, though costs vary considerably depending on the provider, the number of locations covered, and whether you need custom peer group reports – which usually carry additional fees. HRIS-integrated benchmarking platforms tend to be more cost-effective for companies that don't need the breadth of a traditional global survey: Ravio, for instance, starts at £5,000 per year for a 500-person company and includes real-time benchmarking data, automated job mapping, and built-in compensation management tools.
The right answer depends on your organisation. Traditional compensation surveys are well suited to large, global enterprises with dedicated compensation teams and a participant pool that reflects your peer group. HRIS-integrated benchmarking software is typically the stronger choice for fast-growing companies, tech businesses, and organisations that need real-time, peer-relevant data and ongoing compensation management tools in one place. Many organisations use both – combining salary survey data for broad coverage with a real-time platform for fast-moving roles and markets.
Radford is the compensation arm of Aon, a global professional services firm. It offers annual salary surveys – covering base salary, equity, variable pay, and benefits – with particular depth in the technology and life sciences sectors. It also publishes market practice studies on compensation topics including salary increases, incentive design, and severance. Survey data is accessible via The Radford Platform.
Yes. Radford is part of Aon – it's the HR consulting and compensation benchmarking arm of the business. Radford was acquired by Aon in 2010 and operates under the Aon brand. You'll sometimes see it referred to as "Radford, an Aon company" or "Aon's Radford".
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