Industry Compensation Reports

Global Compensation Is Evolving Fast — Here’s What HR Leaders Need to Know Deel’s new State of Global Compensation Report offers one of the most comprehensive looks at how pay is changing across 150+ countries and 300,000+ worker contracts. 🌎 Key findings: Global leaders remain consistent: Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. continue to offer the highest compensation across roles. Sweden and Norway now rival the U.K. in pay competitiveness. ▪️ AI is redefining pay structures: Just as data science did a decade ago, AI roles are fragmenting into specialized functions — from finance to HR to product. These niche roles now command 20–25% salary premiums above market averages due to scarce benchmarks. ▪️ Inflation is reshaping pay strategies: In regions like Turkey and Argentina, frequent economic changes have led companies to favor one-time cash payments over base pay increases. ▪️ Equity is rising globally: Technical roles, especially in emerging markets like Brazil and India, are seeing a sharp rise in equity-heavy packages. The U.S. still leads in total equity value, but Canada and France are catching up fast. ▪️ AI & ML engineers’ pay is surging: At the 90th percentile, salaries are growing even faster than the median, showing just how intense the talent war has become. 💡 Takeaway for HR leaders: To stay competitive, rethink compensation as a  strategic differentiator—not just a cost. Build flexible, localized pay structures, benchmark globally, and explore equity and one-time incentives to balance financial sustainability with talent attraction. 📊 Read the full report to see how your pay strategy stacks up: https://lnkd.in/e8jhX9K6 #GlobalCompensation #HRLeadership #FutureOfWork #AI #PayEquity #Deel #Carta

One of the most important and tricky things for startups to get right is compensation and payroll spending—especially now, with profitability under sharper focus. Yet, clear benchmarks are often missing, leading to tough and sometimes sub-optimal decisions. The overwhelming response to our report last year on Startup Compensation benchmarking encouraged us at xto10x to publish another edition of the report that includes deeper insights and more meaningful data and benchmarks for one of the most critical cost areas in any startup’s P&L. The report themed ‘Evolving Compensation Trends- Indian Startup Ecosystem’ attempts to answer some of the common questions that founders and HR leaders repeatedly ask: - What’s the right mix of cash and equity for different roles? - How should ESOPs be structured to attract and retain talent? - How does compensation evolve as a startup grows? The report includes Compensation trends and Insights on how companies across different industries & stages have approached payroll as percentage of revenue; Fixed hikes, Variable payouts and ESOP grants in 2024-25; Levelling architectures for 8 diverse job families (Marketing, Sales, HR, Finance, Product Management Data Science, Engineering & Design) and a detailed analysis of all the compensation levers - Fixed, Variable, and ESOPs. This year, we’ve expanded the scope with deeper insights on founder and leadership compensation, more business functions, and data from more startups across sectors like Fintech, Edtech, SaaS, D2C, and more. I would like to thank all the startups which contributed to the benchmarking study. Hope this serves as a useful resource for startup teams, CHROs, and investors navigating these decisions to build a competitive yet sustainable rewards framework. Would love to hear thoughts from those who’ve been working through these challenges firsthand. The free version of the report has been provided below. For the complete report or a discussion on Total Rewards, feel free to write to us at rewards@xto10x.com. xto10x PeopleCues

Navigating Pay Trends with Mercer’s Total Remuneration Survey — Insights from Cairo 2025 💼📊 The Mercer Total Remuneration Survey (TRS) session in Cairo provided an in-depth look into how organizations are recalibrating compensation strategies amid ongoing inflation and currency volatility. 🔹 Robust Benchmarking: Mercer’s TRS now spans 438 companies and 200,000 employees in Egypt, part of a 25-million-record global database — a reliable benchmark for both multinationals and local firms. 🔹 Pay Trends 2025: The projected salary movement for 2025 is 20%, exceeding the referenced inflation rate (19.7%) for the first time in years — a signal of renewed confidence and retention focus. 🔹 Functional Pay Insights: “Same incumbent” analysis shows an average 25% increase across roles, with professionals recording the highest median growth (43%). 🔹 Industry Differentiation: Life Sciences and Chemicals continue to outperform the General Market on Total Cash Compensation, while FMCG & Retail remain below median. 🔹 Benefits & Allowances: Car and transport allowances saw steady rises, aligning with cost-of-living pressures and vehicle price inflation. 🔹 Performance Pay Gap: Actual payouts remain below targets since 2022, underlining ongoing performance pressure across sectors. A key takeaway was Mercer’s call for companies to build their own internal inflation indices reflecting their employee demographics — ensuring global alignment without losing local relevance. The TRS remains a vital tool — a compass for compensation navigation — helping organizations maintain competitive pay positioning in turbulent economic waters. #Mercer #Compensation #PayTrends #HRAnalytics #EgyptMarket #AhmedFarahat

👇 The definitive 24/25 crypto comp benchmarks https://dccr.dragonfly.xyz 85 companies • 3.4k+ candidate data points Splits by size, stage, funding, type, and geo YoY industry trends and data ** What’s inside: — Salary, equity, and token ranges + benchmarking tool — Founder compensation — Bonuses and variable pay — Source of hire + time to hire — Offer accept rates + decline reasons — Attrition + retention drivers — Remote and hybrid policy — Token calculation methods + trends — Vesting schedules + starts — Offer composition — Cap table management — Alternative token programs — Hiring footprint + international locations — Regulatory impact — Cost of living adjustments — Recruiting challenges + org models — & more Reliable industry data in crypto is scarce, and we’re proud to give back how we can. This reflects hundreds of hours of build and analysis and is packed with key takeaways. Huge thanks to my co-author, Chris Ahsing; to Felix France at BlockComp for his contributions; to colleagues at Dragonfly for input; and to all participants. If you're a candidate willing to anonymously submit data, it takes ~5min and helps the whole industry. If you're a company interested in participating, we're happy to provide deeper data cuts. Links for both at the top of the report. 🙏 Open to any thoughts or questions, always!

Our latest State of Global Compensation Report - featuring equity insight from our partners Carta - just dropped, and this one is led by Jessica, Deel’s own Head of Global Compensation. Jess shapes Deel’s comp strategy and has been foundational to how we think about fairness and competitiveness across 150+ countries. This new edition gives HR and comp leaders real, actionable insights on how to navigate a fast-changing pay landscape. Highlights: - Equity is going global. With Carta’s data, we’re seeing ownership become a powerful way to build wealth and alignment across borders, especially in Brazil and India. - AI and tech roles are redefining pay norms. Specialized talent is commanding 20–25% premiums, pushing teams to rethink comp structures. - Gender pay gaps persist, but are progressing in countries like Brazil and Colombia shows what’s possible with transparency and intentional hiring. - Contractor markets are maturing. Countries like Argentina and Mexico are thriving hubs for flexible, high-skill talent. If you’re building or scaling a global team, Jessica’s insights offer a practical roadmap for fair, data-driven compensation design. Read on 👉 https://lnkd.in/dtmXytds

I’m pleased to share that the NACD (National Association of Corporate Directors) 2025–2026 Director Compensation Report is now available. This is the 27th year that we’ve published the industry standard for public company board pay practices, structures and trends. In preparing this year’s report, NACD once again collaborated with compensation and leadership consultancy Pearl Meyer to analyze compensation and governance practices at 1,400 public companies across 24 industries. Not surprisingly, this year’s findings shows that while board responsibilities and the expectations placed on them continue to expand, public company director compensation levels are growing only modestly. Median public company directors’ pay for 2025 grew by 3% year-over-year. Overall, compensation trends toward simplicity and transparency continue. And the data show that boards are adapting their structures and practices to meet new demands while keeping pay aligned with long-term value creation and shareholder interests. At the same time, median director tenure is down – now at 6.1 years compared to 8.7 in 2015. This continued curve signals an ongoing emphasis on board refreshment. The report highlights how boards are evolving their structures and compensation programs to support oversight of technology, risk management and changing governance expectations. NACD members can learn more and access a copy of the report here: https://direc.to/fTQr. Not an NACD member? Reach out to join@nacdonline.org to learn more!

Senior SWE pay looks very different when you only count cash. $500K+ cash packages, finance firms on top, and Big Tech largely missing. When we isolate cash compensation only (base salary + annual bonus) for Senior Software Engineers in 2025, a very different leaderboard emerges. Jane Street leads at roughly $544K median compensation in cash, followed by Netflix at ~$520K and Two Sigma at ~$500K. When compared to the total compensation leaderboard from the Levels.fyi, 2025 End of Year Report, it’s interesting to note how the placements have shifted. When including only cash compensation, you’ll find the hedge funds and quant firms rise to the top again, even at the more senior levels. Entry-level generally sees prestigious finance firms dominate because Big Tech and other firms don’t compensate with large equity grants at that level yet. However, at the Senior SWE level where there’s normally more equity included, cutting out the stock grants shows finance firms back on top. What’s important here is what’s not being counted. Because this view excludes equity, Big Tech companies (even ones with highly liquid RSUs) fall off the leaderboard despite offering extremely competitive total compensation once equity is included. In many cases, equity is doing most of the work. This doesn’t invalidate the total compensation rankings from our 2025 end-of-year report, however. In fact, it explains the gap. Companies like OpenAI and Databricks top total comp leaderboards largely due to hefty equity grants even though they’re private. While those equity grants are more illiquid than, say, Big Tech, there’s been a growing trend for large-scale private companies to offer regular tender offers turn that equity into real, near-term liquidity. This view, however, shows the companies with the highest guaranteed compensation outside of any swing variables like equity. Cash-only highlights firms that pay aggressively upfront. Total comp captures long-term value, risk, and liquidity structures. If you work in HR/compensation and want to explore cuts like this yourself, our benchmarking tool lets you run deeply granular queries across role, level, location, and compensation components to see exactly how these tradeoffs play out in the market. Check it out here: levels.fyi/benchmark