kbardaro

We have an entire team of data analysts, data scientists, and economists who work on collecting, validating, cleaning and augmenting our crowd-sourced compensation data. One example of validation they do is compare our compensation data to other sources of compensation data (both publicly available like the BLS and privately available like traditional surveys) to look for systematic biases. When we do these apples-to-apples comparisons, our pay data not only strongly correlates with the other sources, but also provides more depth and nuance then these sources as well.

Another thing to mention is the drive to fill out a PayScale survey is to understand your price in the labor market; how you compare to others just like you. Given that, there is no reason to lie or provide inaccurate data because the report you get at the end will be totally useless.

We source our cost of living data from The Council for Community and Economic Research (C2ER). You can read more about their Cost-of-living index here: https://www.coli.org/

The locations they provide are based largely on metropolitan statistical areas, micropolitan statistical areas, metropolitan divisions and New England Cities and Town Areas. You can see these definitions here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/bulletins/2013/b-13-01.pdf. If you can't find your specific location, try focusing on another city or town that is in the same metro (which largely align with county lines).