How salary data is normalized and compared
How official salary rows are kept comparable while still preserving source year, country, currency and metric type.
Salary tables are not all the same
Public salary sources can report hourly, monthly or yearly pay. They can publish average, median, quartiles, deciles, gender splits, regions, states or broad national values. They can also use national currencies and different occupation systems. Treating all of those rows as one simple salary number would hide important context.
World Career Atlas keeps source labels, years, currency, geography and metric type attached to salary rows. That lets users inspect whether they are reading an average, median, lower quartile, upper quartile or another source-specific value.
Why source labels stay visible
Currency conversion and period conversion can make pages easier to compare, but the original source still matters. A monthly wage from one country and an annual wage from another may both be displayed in a common format, yet they may have been collected with different survey methods.
For that reason, profile and comparison pages show salary years and source labels. Missing values should be hidden or labelled rather than shown as zero, because zero often means the source did not publish that metric.