How SalaryCube's Bigfoot Live Data Works: Sources, Coverage, and Freshness
SalaryCube's compensation benchmarks come from Bigfoot Live, a real-time salary data engine covering 35,000+ US job titles across all US industries and metro areas, built on 800 million+ data points and updated daily. Bigfoot Live draws on multilayered US sources, including live job postings, public filings, and direct client participation, updated daily. No survey participation is required to access the data.
This page is for HR and compensation professionals evaluating whether SalaryCube's data is current, broad, and defensible enough to support pay decisions. It describes what feeds the benchmarks and why that matters; it does not disclose proprietary processing.
- 35,000+
- US job titles in Bigfoot Live, across all industries and metro areas
- 800M+
- data points behind the benchmarks
- Daily
- update cadence, versus the annual cycle of traditional surveys
- US only
- all US industries and cities; no global or multi-country claims
What data sources feed SalaryCube's benchmarks?
Bigfoot Live draws on multilayered US sources, including live job postings, public filings, and direct client participation, updated daily.
Three kinds of US sources feed Bigfoot Live: live job postings, public filings, and direct client participation. Together they cover all US industries and cities, and the engine refreshes daily so the benchmark you pull today reflects today's market.
Survey data you import is a separate thing. Through Data Sources, customers can bring in Mercer, Radford, WTW, Comptryx, Payscale, Salary.com, or custom survey files. That imported data stays private to each customer and is never blended into Bigfoot Live's market data. It works across all SalaryCube tools alongside the market data, and you can compare the two side by side.
- Live job postings, public filings, and direct client participation (US only)
- Updated daily; no annual survey cycle to wait on
- No survey participation required to access the data
- Imported survey data stays private to your company and is never mixed into the market dataset
How current is the data?
Bigfoot Live is updated daily. Traditional salary surveys update annually and typically cover 200 to 500 jobs. Bigfoot Live covers 35,000+ US job titles and refreshes every day. Traditional surveys also require months of participation before results arrive; SalaryCube provides instant access. For a compensation team, that means an offer, a range refresh, or a merit budget can be checked against this month's market rather than last year's survey.
| Dimension | Traditional salary surveys | SalaryCube (Bigfoot Live) |
|---|---|---|
| Update cadence | Annual | Daily |
| Job titles covered | Typically 200 to 500 jobs | 35,000+ titles via Bigfoot Live |
| Access | Months of participation before results | Instant access, no survey participation required |
| Geography | Varies by vendor | US only: all US industries and metro areas |
What does the data cover?
Bigfoot Live covers 35,000+ US job titles across all US industries and cities. DataDive Pro, the reporting engine, organizes 17,000+ of those titles by job family and level so teams can see pay progression from entry level to executive and filter by geography, industry, revenue, and headcount.
SalaryCube sells industry-specific data packages for Healthcare, Information Technology, Manufacturing, and Real Estate, plus cross-industry coverage. Every quote includes the full platform across all supported industries, with no per-industry fees and no modules to unlock.
US only. SalaryCube does not claim global or multi-country coverage. If your organization benchmarks roles outside the United States, you will need a multi-country provider for those markets. You can import that survey data into SalaryCube privately through Data Sources.
How do percentiles and ranges work?
DataDive Pro reports pay from the 10th to the 90th percentile for each benchmark, so a team can see the full distribution rather than a single average. Percentiles are the standard way compensation professionals express market position: the 50th percentile is the market median, and a range built around P25, P50, and P75 shows where an employer chooses to meet, lead, or lag the market. For a plain-language walkthrough, see what the 75th percentile means in salary.
Range Builder turns those percentiles into pay ranges using configurable percentile recipes (P25/P50/P75). You choose the recipe that matches your pay philosophy, and the range is created from real-time market data in 60 seconds. Ranges can be refreshed from the latest market data in one click.
Imported survey data can be aged to current inside Data Sources, so a survey published months ago can sit next to daily-updated market data on a comparable basis. You see both the original and the aged value.
Is the data defensible for audits and leadership review?
Defensibility comes from being able to show where a number came from and what changed since. SalaryCube builds that record into the tools that consume the data:
Version history and audit trails on every pay range
Range Builder keeps full version history and audit trails, so you can show which benchmark, which percentile recipe, and which market snapshot produced a range, and what changed when it was refreshed.
Product detailsA three-layer decision model in merit cycles
Comp Planning puts internal position data, your benchmark ranges, and market context side by side in every manager worksheet, with AI-assisted recommendations and a full audit trail.
Product detailsAudit-ready FLSA classification reports
FLSA Analyzer walks each role through a guided questionnaire and produces audit-ready PDF reports with transparent reasoning for every exempt or non-exempt call.
Product details
Security posture. SalaryCube completed a SOC 2 Type I audit in July 2026, with a Type II audit in progress, and provides its SOC 2 report to customers under NDA.
Read the security and SOC 2 overviewData Lab: how the monthly release numbers are defined
SalaryCube Data Lab publishes a small set of statistics each month about advertised pay in US employer job postings. The definitions below are read from the release itself, version-stamped, and change only when a new definition version is published.
Data Lab release definitions
Advertised pay in US employer job postings, computed from the job-postings layer of Bigfoot Live. Not what employees are paid. No forecasts.
Release 2026-08 (August 2026), methodology version 2026.09-v1. Current window 2026-05-27 to 2026-08-24 (828,050 postings from 85,442 employers); prior window 2026-02-26 to 2026-05-26. Cells with fewer than the stated minimum postings or employers, or where one employer posted more than half the jobs, are not published.
- S1Median advertised base pay, US, all industries
- The median of the annualized midpoint of the pay figure stated in each US employer job posting dated in the current 90-day window, compared with the 90 days before it. Postings with the same title, employer, city, state and pay figures count once (newest wins). An interquartile-range fence removes mis-parsed figures; a $15,000 floor and a $900,000 ceiling apply. Hourly and other periodic rates are annualized at 2,080 hours; the midpoint of a stated range is used.
- Advertised pay is what employers offer in postings, not what employees are paid. A raw median moves when the mix of titles, employers and job boards changes; read it alongside the matched-title change (S1b).
- Definition v1 · 90-day window · published at n ≥ 30 postings and ≥ 5 employers
- S1bMatched-title change in advertised pay
- For every normalized job title with at least 100 postings from at least 10 employers in both the current and the prior 90-day window, the change in that title's median advertised pay is computed. The published figure is the median of those title-level changes, weighted by each title's prior-window posting count.
- Holds the title mix constant, so it is the number to quote for movement. Titles are normalized by lowercasing and removing punctuation and bracketed tails; no manual mapping is applied.
- Definition v1 · 90-day window · published at n ≥ 100 postings and ≥ 10 employers
- S2Range vs single-rate share; median advertised range width
- Share of postings in the current 90-day window that state a pay range (minimum below maximum) rather than a single rate, overall and by title level band. Among range postings, the median of (maximum - minimum) / midpoint is the advertised range width.
- Level bands come from words in the title (manager, director, executive); postings without such words are grouped as individual contributor.
- Definition v1 · 90-day window · published at n ≥ 30 postings and ≥ 5 employers
- S3Hourly or periodic rate vs salaried advertised share
- Share of postings in the current 90-day window whose stated pay was an hourly or other periodic rate that SalaryCube annualized, overall and by state (states with at least 500 postings).
- Interim definition: a posting counts as hourly or periodic when its pay figure was annualized during ingest (the AssumedHours flag). The stated-basis definition (v2) replaces it once 90 days of basis-stamped postings exist.
- Definition v1 · 90-day window · published at n ≥ 30 postings and ≥ 5 employers
- S4Where the same job pays most and least, by state
- For three common non-tech jobs (staff accountant, HR generalist, maintenance technician), the median advertised pay by state over the trailing 180 days, using a frozen list of title synonyms and exclusions. States with fewer than 30 postings or fewer than 5 employers, or where one employer posted more than half the jobs, are not published.
- Titles are matched on words in the posting title; senior, lead, manager and director variants are excluded so the cells compare like with like. Metro-level cuts arrive in a later release.
- Definition v1 · 180-day window · published at n ≥ 30 postings and ≥ 5 employers
- S5Remote vs onsite advertised pay
- Among postings in the current 90-day window that state a work arrangement, the median advertised pay for remote, hybrid and onsite postings, the gap between remote and onsite medians, and the share of stated-arrangement postings that are remote, compared with the prior 90 days.
- Only postings that state an arrangement are included: where stated, roughly 4 in 10 postings. The gap is a difference in what is advertised, not a like-for-like premium.
- Definition v1 · 90-day window · published at n ≥ 30 postings and ≥ 5 employers
- S6Freshness
- Pay-bearing US postings added to Bigfoot Live in the 30 days ending on the ingest cut (counted from successful daily ingest files), and the share of the trailing-12-month posting corpus that is dated in those 30 days.
- Bigfoot Live ingests one file per day; a posting is dated by its posting date, not the day it was ingested.
- Definition v1 · 30-day window
- S6bShare of tracked titles refreshed
- Among normalized titles with at least 100 postings in the trailing 12 months, the share that received at least one new posting in the 30 days ending on the ingest cut.
- Definition v1 · 365-day window
- S7Sector movers
- For employer sectors with at least 1,000 postings from at least 50 employers in both the current and the prior 90-day window, the matched-title change in median advertised pay (titles with enough postings in that sector in both windows, weighted by prior-window count). Sectors are classified at the employer level.
- Sector is the employer's classified sector, not the job's; coverage (share of postings with a classified employer) is published with the release. Sectors with fewer than 10 matched titles are not published.
- Definition v1 · 90-day window · published at n ≥ 1,000 postings and ≥ 50 employers
Frequently Asked Questions
Which SalaryCube products run on this data?
Real-time data feeds every workflow: Bigfoot Live and DataDive Pro supply daily-updated market data; AI Job Match turns any job description into a benchmark in seconds; Range Builder turns benchmarks into defensible pay ranges; Comp Planning turns ranges into merit cycles with budgets and audit trails; FLSA Analyzer keeps classifications compliant. One platform from market data to pay decision.
See the data on your own roles
Try SalaryCube free: benchmark 5 of your roles and run 2 live market searches. No credit card. No data upload required.