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QUESTION:  How is wage data compiled and how old is the survey data used in ERI analyses?

 

ERI collects, compiles and analyzes many variables relating to the market pricing of wages and salaries from new surveys and sources each quarter, including position, base pay, area, industry and company size data.  As described in the FAQ answering the question, "Where do these numbers come from?," data is also collected via digitization of public records, ERI's eSpideri datamining, ERI's patented wage, salary, cost-of-living, college graduate, and benefit surveys, analyses of other surveys, leasing of proprietary datasets, national statistics, and census data (many small European countries have conclusive data in their census).

 

For any given position, area, industry, etc., the number of employees may be in the hundreds or thousands of incumbents (homogenous job family types). All data collected is updated to a common reference date.

 

As surveys and data are collected/published at different times during the year, we provide the additional service of year-round analysis and quarterly updated releases of our databases. This ensures that our customers are always accessing the most "up to date" information available.  The data always reflects the most recent data available (taking care not to violate the FTC "safety zone").  

 

As a further quality control check, current norms of central tendency are cross checked utilizing the preceding period's data.  Beginning in the mid 1980's with the creation of the Assessor Series, ERI has generated a single polynomial curve for each Assessor Series job.  Picture a graph with the x-axis spanning the years 1977 to 2022, where a single source/survey's data for a job is shown as a “dot” with an incumbent count and a measure of variability (standard error, deviation, etc.).  Picture three dots for 1977, eight dots or surveys for 1978, etc.  

 

This long-term study (a curve cut through many years of dots of varying power) allows ERI to establish strict quality control standards, providing protection from a single year's variance created by any particular survey (a high or low dot/survey in the current year).  It takes powerful data to significantly alter an Assessor Series job value curve.  All these curves' slopes differ; for more discussion, see ERI's Salary Increase Survey.  If jobs did not differ in their increase rates, one would only need to purchase a salary survey from some past year and increase all jobs' values by a common percentage over subsequent years.

 

To learn more about how data from multiple salary surveys are combined in the Assessor Series, see Assessor Series FAQ #31.