Finding your market rate with real salary data
Finding Your Market Rate With Real Salary Data
The single most expensive number in a career is the one you never checked. A salary is not a reward for past effort and it is not a valuation of your worth as a person. It is a price, in a market, for a specific set of tasks in a specific city. Prices can be looked up. Most people do not, and the cost of that is not one negotiation — it is every future raise calculated as a percentage of a number that was too low from the start.
Ask for 61,000 € instead of 55,000 € and the first year is worth 6,000 €. With 4% annual increases on both, the gap widens to 8,500 € by year ten — roughly 48,000 € of cumulative difference, from one conversation that lasted an hour.
A salary range is a market, and markets have prices
Every role has a range in every labour market, and the range is usually wider than people expect. A mid-level product designer in Germany might find 58,000 € at the bottom and 78,000 € at the top for what the job ads all call the same thing. The difference is not talent. It is city, industry, company size, how well the last person negotiated, and whether the employer has ever had to compete for that role.
That 20,000 € spread is the space the negotiation happens in. It only exists if you know it exists. Someone who believes the job is worth 60,000 € will be pleased with 62,000 € and never find out what the ceiling looked like.
One job title, one country, five different prices. The spread is larger than most raises.
Illustrative. Rounded midpoints of published salary ranges for a comparable role, used to show the shape of the spread rather than an official figure.
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