About CheckMyPayRate

What the tool does

The calculator compares your salary against gross benchmark figures for 20 countries and 13 sectors, in each country's own currency. You can enter your pay monthly, annually or hourly, and the result is shown as a clear percentage above or below the statistical benchmark, with a shareable result card. There is also a full comparison table, a downloadable dataset for researchers, and dedicated pages for every country and sector combination.

Where the data comes from

National average wages are derived from OECD average annual wage statistics, and sector figures from Eurostat sector pay ratios applied to each country's national average. The figures update automatically when new official statistics are published, and every page shows the reference year it is using.

Our principles

• Most salary inputs are processed only in your browser. The US Net Salary Calculator sends the tax inputs described in the Privacy Policy through our server to PolicyEngine for the requested calculation.
• The benchmark dataset is open under the CC BY 4.0 license — free to use and redistribute with attribution (download it here).
• The site is free to use, may be supported by advertising in the future, and is explained in five languages: English, Estonian, Spanish, German and French.

Who runs this site

CheckMyPayRate is an independent project built and maintained by Marko, based in Estonia — not by a recruitment agency, a payroll provider or a job board. I don't have a formal background in economics or finance, but I've followed financial markets, personal finance and entrepreneurship closely as a long-standing personal interest for over two decades. That independence from the recruitment industry is deliberate: salary data published by companies that also sell recruitment services has an obvious incentive problem, because higher published benchmarks make their services look more valuable. I sell nothing to employers and take no payment for the figures published here. Every question, correction or data request reaches me directly — see the contact page.

How we keep the figures accurate

An automated job checks the OECD and Eurostat sources once each day. When valid source data is available, it stores the national average wage for every country, applies the sector ratios that apply to that country (its own Eurostat ratios, the EU-27 estimate for Canada and Australia, or none where sectors are not shown), and records the result with its reference year. If a source is temporarily unavailable, the site keeps serving the last stored figures instead of replacing them with an unrelated estimate. The exact chain of steps, including the formula and its known limitations, is documented on the methodology page, and each country page lists the specific source series behind its own figures.

What this tool is not

The figures here are national, sector-level gross averages. They are not job-title benchmarks, not adjusted for your seniority, city, company size or hours worked, and they are not financial, tax or legal advice. A salary that reads as below average on this site may be entirely appropriate for an early-career role in a lower-cost region, and one that reads as above average may still be below the going rate for a scarce specialism. Treat the result as one reference point in a negotiation, alongside job adverts, union or professional-association scales, and conversations with people doing the same work.

Editorial and advertising policy

Running the site costs money, and it is currently free and without a sign-up wall with no advertising at all. Some pages include clearly marked affiliate links to salary negotiation courses; if you buy through them, the site may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Affiliate partners have no influence on the figures or content. If advertising is added in the future, it will be kept strictly separate from editorial content: advertisers will have no influence over the benchmark figures, the guides, or which countries and sectors we cover, and no advertiser will see the site's content before it is published. Ads will be clearly separated from the page content, we will not publish paid or sponsored articles disguised as guidance, and today no advertising cookies or live ad units are active. If you decline, the site works exactly the same way without any ad scripts.

Corrections

If a figure looks wrong, we want to hear about it. Send the country, the sector and the source you are comparing against, and we will check it against the underlying official series. Confirmed errors are corrected in the dataset itself, which means the fix propagates to the calculator, the comparison table, the country pages and the downloadable files at the same time — there is no separate copy of the numbers to fall out of sync.