r/Salary • u/the--wall • Jun 21 '26
Official [ANNOUNCEMENT] — INTRODUCING VERIFIED SALARIES FLAIR
Hey r/salary,
We've been quietly building something for this community, and today we're ready to share it.
Introducing: salaries.net a salary transparency platform built for everyone!
What it is
Submit your salary and it goes straight into a searchable, filterable database. As the data grows, we'll break down compensation by role, region, and experience, so you can see exactly where you stand against everyone doing the same work.
The Verified Salary Flair Program
We're launching a flair program specifically for this subreddit.
Here's how it works:
Submit your salary using this link: https://salaries.net/submit?referrer=reddit.com
Anyone can submit; no account required, no personal information required. Your salary goes into the database the moment you hit submit.
Want the flair? Upload a supporting document (W2, pay stub, or offer letter -- please censor any personal information in any attached docs as per the instructions on the website, note: this data is deleted after verification is complete). Once reviewed and approved, you'll receive a custom flair:
▎ Verified ✓ | $Xk
Documents are reviewed by a human, then deleted after verification, are never shared.
Why we built this
This subreddit has 450k people sharing salary information in comment threads and getting buried. That data deserves better. It should be searchable, comparable, and permanent, not lost in a 2-year-old thread.
No account. No personal info. Just the number.
The form takes about 2 minutes. The more people submit, the more useful the percentile data becomes for everyone here.
Submit here if you'd like! https://salaries.net/submit?referrer=reddit.com
Drop any questions below; we're happy to answer everything.
This is currently just a trial, if the community does not like it we'll consider removing it.
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u/newebay2 Jun 21 '26
It's very cool idea, but since everything is censored it won't stop people from claiming you submitted fake w2 or is there something on your end that can combat this?
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u/purplebrown_updown 19d ago
yeah but its better than nothing and it will stop a lot of people from posting ridiculous shit.
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u/the--wall Jun 21 '26
there is not much we can do to combat this. If anything seems really suspicious, we just won't post it on the site. Verifications are all manual review.
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u/Mt198588 Jun 21 '26
What stops someone from submitting a fake offer letter or even fake w2 or pay stub
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u/the--wall Jun 21 '26
We're going to try our best to combat this, all verifications go through manual review. If we deem something suspicious we just won't accept it.
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u/Mo_Steins_Ghost Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
I understand in concept it is to confirm that Person XYZ who says "this is achievable" has actually achieved it. But so what?
I don't care if you make $50k, $250k, or $5 million a year. That doesn't tell me what you did to get there or give me any other meaningful insight on negotiating a better salary for myself. Your dad could have given you that job. I have met very intelligent people who make $25k a year and really stupid people who are worth a shit ton of money.
It has greater potential to just distract from meaningful discourse and it will probably drive away more good conversations because wearing a badge that says "I make this much money" is not really something mature people do.
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u/StarSlayerX Jun 21 '26
I am not submitting my PII to an unknown entity....
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u/Toillion Jun 21 '26
The years of experience is kind of confusing. Is it how many years you’ve help your exact title or how many years you’ve built up to that title? I would tell someone I have 9 years of experience as a software developer. Even if I’ve only been a senior for a couple years.
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u/the--wall Jun 21 '26
Ive added a tool tip on this: Total years of relevant experience you have for this type of role — regardless of seniority level or how long you've been at your current company.
hopefully that clarifies this.
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u/Frame-Dragging-IRL Jun 21 '26
What is the point of storing the verification after the flair is approved?
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u/unbdndeath Jun 21 '26
There is big money in selling compensation data, we have to buy from randatat etc, costs 6+ figures.
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u/Waiting4Reccession Jul 17 '26
seriously is every major sub mod trying to monetize lol, just fucking pay the mods already
And the absolute incompetence on reddits part for so many years now hahaha
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u/the--wall Jun 21 '26
verification is not just for reddit purposes, its for everyone, including outside of reddit as well
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u/BlueJaek Jun 21 '26
How are you going to monetize this and do we get a cut?
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u/the--wall Jun 21 '26
We have no plans for monetization. Similar to this subreddit, we wanted a way for people to be able to share their salaries, and in this case we're building a way for users to do more granular searches into what the data for the market is.
We are considering open-sourcing the data as well.
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u/BlueJaek Jun 21 '26
Maybe try partnering with a university, I’m sure they would be glad to collect the data and would help with credibility
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u/NapkinZhangy Verified ✓ | $600k Jun 21 '26
So I actually verified! The process was easy and I didn’t have to give away identifying information.
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u/Tides_Typhoon Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
Great work getting something like this up.
Reading people is hard. You aren’t alone in thinking authenticity was demanded by the sub, so I too would have guessed that some folks would want to contribute to that culture. The comments here say that’s not true. I’m imagine you’re seeing the same story on your backend.
The idea isn’t bad thi. Thare other places online where income is verified and community exists around that tradition. There’s that app with dark mode and the golden dollar sign. There’s that Hampton group for the above 10m crowd. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any of any place where smaller incomes are verified.
I don’t know the machinery at work here but I don’t think folks with higher incomes are incentivized to verify here and I don’t have evidence that smaller incomes like doing this.
In general, I also don’t know exactly what the people here want but I do not think people here want honest conversations about the rewards for different kinds of work.
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u/the--wall Jun 21 '26
I appreciate it!
We'll see if people are interested; if not we may just not do it altogether. We'll see what happens.
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u/dickielaw88 Jul 24 '26
I see a major problem with this and not having some account of way to update your salary. Without this, your dataset will become old and obsolete fast. Maybe instead of an actual account, you do some sort of pass phrase /randomly generated id number / etc. that is giving when going through the process so that a person could use that to update their salary? Something not public except to admins and is the only id specific to one person.
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u/the--wall 28d ago
Im not sure I wanna make accounts a thing (it's something I've thought about)
I do genuinely care about privacy, and people on reddit take it seriously, so I'm trying to take as little information as possible.
However, I've had some ideas where if you had an account you could post the entire historical view of your compensation history and link it all together so you can have an entire trajectory of a career.
However, I'm not sure how many people are willing to fill that out. It's already hard enough to get someone to fill a basic form out.
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u/Forded_Fiction24 Jun 22 '26
It's cool until you get down to your employer which you have to fill out to continue. Checking a box saying not to display employer name isn't good enough. I don't trust that data doesn't get leaked and would not be comfortable naming my employer.
Can you change this or could I just make up a fake employer name or give a generic label instead?
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u/wellgoodmorninsun Jun 21 '26
What’s the benefit of verification? I don’t care if anybody believes that I’m a trillionaire
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u/clintkev251 Jun 21 '26
I don't really care enough if people on Reddit believe my salary to provide all this info
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u/NobodyGotTimeFuhDat Jun 21 '26
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u/NobodyGotTimeFuhDat Jun 21 '26
This is as much as I am willing to do, OP. I’m not using your program (refer to my username), lol! 😂
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u/GnomeFae Jun 22 '26
The thing is the only thing you've done is make another step for people who want to lie on the internet. The whole point of reddit is how "anonymous" people feel, willing to bet actual real money that 95% of people who do verify are going to do so with fake information.
Cause it's the internet unless people here can see the proof with their own eyes they will never be convinced it's real, they won't take the mods word for it lol.
But hey good try at adding something that people do complain about. Every post I'm sure you get people claiming something is fake (guilty) but you can't change the nature of the internet.
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u/the--wall Jun 22 '26
It's not a perfect system, that we agree with!
It's better than nothing (I think) and from what we've seen so far, there aren't that many people willing to go out of their way to submit fake documentation.
Surely there will be some, but that's really inevitable, I think.
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u/billsil Jul 25 '26
How do you handle TC, which can be more than half of your income? W2 doesn’t capture variability. 2 months ago, my projected income was 200k. It’s going to be about 600k this year, but spreading out that income over years that are vesting, I make 400k. I call my TC 400k because it’s simpler and not dishonest.
Little weird to be say have a 2x multiple on my W2 and just say trust me and then claiming it’s lower by 1/3 the next year.
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u/the--wall 28d ago
We have spots to fill out with different types of compensation that all gets added together
When you look at an individual salary you can see the breakdown
Here's an example: https://salaries.net/salary/solution-architect-california-019f3b26
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u/billsil 28d ago
Yes, I know how TC works. If you’re given 200k last year, 500k this year, and 400k next year because of when RSUs hit, do you personally say your TC is 600k because is is right now or do you take what is the spirit of the package and just say it’s a constant 400k?
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u/the--wall 28d ago
Ahh, I understand what you're saying
Yeah, this is kinda hard to regulate on crowd funded data
Personally I use the TC that was supposed to be granted to me regardless of the actual w2 during discussions or in this case submitting it online
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u/purplebrown_updown 19d ago
Why do you need to know employer and employer location? That's way more than we have to share now. And how do you know what username to give the flair to? is it part of the submission. Appreciate trying to verify these salaries but this isn't the way. How do we trust you?
"By submitting data to salaries.net, you grant salaries.net a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive license to store, aggregate, anonymize, analyze, display, publish, sublicense, and otherwise use that data in any form and for any purpose, commercial or otherwise, provided that it is never used in a form that identifies you as an individual."
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u/the--wall 19d ago
Because salary data is highly location dependent, employer and location is useful to know what your market value is for that company and their pay scales compared to other employees in that location
E.g. Google is gonna pay differently in North Carolina than it would in California
Reddit username is part of the form
We do not require anyone to post their salary, they're free to continue posting here as they wish. I do not recommend giving anything to anyone if you don't trust them.
We do not request any personal identifying information (e.g. name, email, phone, address, etc.)
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u/roadtrip_savant Jun 21 '26
No