Why are the salary ranges I find online so wrong?

Online salary ranges are often wrong because they blend data from different countries, company sizes and industries into one number, and nobody checks the result. The top end is usually the least reliable part: built from US figures, a few outliers, or job titles that mean something else elsewhere. Treat it as a rough direction, never as the band the employer is actually working with.

The problem is that a wrong number does not stay on your screen. It follows you into the salary conversation.

Where do the inflated numbers come from?

Geography is the biggest distortion in online salary data. A senior engineer in Spain is paid differently from a senior engineer in the US, yet salary sites and AI search happily mix both into one range. The American end pulls the top up, and a European candidate walks in with a number no European budget was ever built on.

Company size distorts the picture too. A "Senior" at a twenty-person startup and a "Senior" at an established organisation can be paid very differently, and sometimes the startup pays more. Same title, different job behind it.

Industry labels mislead as well. Pharmaceutical, chemical, banking, crypto: we assume these sit at the top of the market. Sometimes they do. But each organisation is run differently, and the industry tells you very little about one company's band.

Why do even sceptical candidates get pulled in?

I have been on the job seeker side of this too, and I was not immune. Before interviews I did the same quick research everyone does: Glassdoor, Google, AI search. More than once the range came back two or three times higher than anything I had seen in the market.

In my own field it was almost comical. After years in the job I knew that recruiters in the UK and Europe very rarely make over 100k EUR, and yet some sources listed that as the middle of the range. I did not believe it. But I would be lying if I said it did not get to me. In the back of my head: what if there is some truth in it, what if I am the sucker who asks for less?

Salary sites are a bit like heights on dating profiles. Self-reported, rounded up, and nobody comes to measure. The truth only ever came from the other side of the table, the people actually interviewing me.

What does the recruiter think when your number is far above the band?

A number far above the band does not make the recruiter think you are greedy. We do not get upset that you aimed high. The question in our head is different: would this person actually accept what we can pay, or negotiate hard at offer stage, or keep us waiting whilst other offers come in?

Salary conversations are a game of poker where neither side shows its cards first. Take a junior role budgeted at 30k EUR a year and a candidate asking for 45k. Asking someone to cut their expectation by a third feels less respectful than parting ways, and with a flood of applicants already inside the range, the follow-up conversation often never happens. It is not right or wrong. It is volume. (More on this in why a salary number gets you cut before anyone negotiates.)

And a candidate who offers to drop from 90k to 30k to keep the process alive does not look flexible. It looks like a number that was never real, and that is rarely a green flag.

How should I set my number instead?

A safer salary number starts from the typical range for the role in the location it is based, not from the highest figure you found. In the UK, senior developers sit roughly between 60k and 90k GBP. Then look at your current salary and aim for a sensible jump: for me, that was usually around 20%. If that still falls inside the bracket, you have room to explore the higher end, or push slightly above it, whilst staying open to accept below.

Most candidates believe that sharing the lowest number they would accept exposes them to being pushed down. I used to think that too. The opposite risk is bigger: hold back the floor, and the other side may simply not believe you would go below your headline number. That puts them in an awkward position, and awkward positions in hiring tend to end with a polite rejection.

I always wanted a range I could feel good about, whatever the internet said. The online number is not your worth. It is somebody else's guess, and you are the one who pays if it is wrong.

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