Salary percentiles

Points in a salary distribution: the 50th percentile is the median, and the 25th and 75th bound the middle half of reported pay.

Last updated September 28, 2026.

Definition

What Salary percentiles means

A percentile is the value below which a given share of observations fall. For salaries, the 10th percentile is the pay that only one in ten reports is below, the 50th is the median, and the 90th is what only one in ten exceed. Compensation teams set bands from them, usually around the 25th to 75th.

Percentiles are more useful than an average for pay, because a few very high salaries pull the average up while the median stays put. They are only as good as the reports behind them: a title with a handful of reports has percentiles that move with every new one.

Clair's Glassdoor salaries endpoint returns base_pay and total_pay at the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles for each job title, with salaries_count, the number of reports behind them.

In the data

How it appears in a response

GET /v1/company/salaries?engine=glassdoor&employer_id=9079&slug=Google&page=2 · results.0

{
  "position": 11,
  "job_title": "Software Engineer III",
  "job_title_id": "4514",
  "salaries_count": 950,
  "currency": "USD",
  "period": "year",
  "base_pay": {
    "p10": 159325,
    "p25": 176568,
    "p50": 197943,
    "p75": 221906,
    "p90": 245922
  },
  "total_pay": {
    "p10": 271280,
    "p25": 321338,
    "p50": 390969,
    "p75": 492142,
    "p90": 599160
  },
  "last_reported_at": "2026-07-24T07:10:52.947Z"
}

Software Engineer III at Google, base and total pay percentiles. From a recorded Glassdoor API response.

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