Top salary sites for working out how much you should be getting paid salary comparisons in the usa best websites to use

Top salary sites for working out how much you should be getting paid salary comparisons in the usa best websites to us, and to evaluate what you are worth, it can be a good idea to use a salary site, especially if you work in a high paying jobs field, as a salary site allows you to gauge your worth, by comparing what others are being paid in your field of expertise.

After discarding sites with unreliable information, difficult navigation and overly complicated pricing, we settled on the nine compensation sites that offer the most useful and accessible data for the widest range of people. The sites have distinct strengths. Some are better for beginners, others for people in certain fields--but all are valuable research tools. Here are our eight favorite free sites, listed in descending order, followed by one outstanding site that charges a range of fees.

SALARY.COM

Our No. 1 site offers the best of all worlds. With 1,100 job titles in its database, Salary.com is the powerhouse in the category, yet its streamlined design makes it a snap to use. Within two mouse clicks from the home page, the Salary Wizard search engine offers reports that include base pay and salary ranges for narrowly defined job titles in specific regions. Click again, and you get total compensation (including extras such as bonuses). Handy links let you see what you would make in various parts of the country or if you changed careers. Bottom line: This is the place to start your search.

AMERICA'S CAREER INFONET

Funded by the U.S. Department of Labor, the site covers more than 460 occupations, from oilfield roustabouts to motion-picture projectionists. If you're in an unusual industry or thinking about a career switch, it's a great resource. Salary data is just three clicks off the home page. Type in a job title for a keyword search or select a predefined "job family" from the scroll-down menu one click from the home page. We like the links to other information, including skills needed for each job, job market outlook and job postings listed by state and profession.

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF LABOR

This site is not perfect. We wish there were more charts to make the statistics easier to read. Limited salary reports cover just 254 jobs and offer only national median earnings. That said, the site's thorough job descriptions give rich detail about the nature of the jobs that are included and the education and skills needed for advancement, making it a good choice for entry-level and middle managers who are mapping out their next career moves.

ECONOMIC RESEARCH INSTITUTE

The site's search engine allows you to search by zip code or by state and city. Positions are listed alphabetically, not by industry, making it time consuming to obtain data for various jobs in a particular field. If you're willing to schlep through the entire alphabet, though, you'll find precise job titles that aren't often listed on other sites. For example, rather than a generalized listing for "doctors," we found reports for chiropractors, periodontists, pediatricians, dental ceramists (and their assistants) and on and on. Salary data are listed as averages, not as the more helpful ranges.

FUTURE STEP

This is the site for ambitious mid- to senior-level corporate executives. Futurestep, which is a subsidiary of the executive search giant Korn/Ferry International, presents tailored earnings "profiles" for each user who registers at the site. Registration, which involves the types of work-style and personality tests administered by recruiters or career counselors, took us about an hour. Questions covered career and salary history, career objectives, personality traits and work priorities. Twenty-four hours later, you log back in to your secure account to retrieve a personal earnings estimate of what you're worth. You'll also get feedback, with a detailed analysis (you're "analytical," perhaps, or "collaborative") and a list of the careers for which you are best suited. We thought the report was trenchant and helpful for those who don't mind revealing information about themselves and being put in a database to be considered for openings being filled by Futurestep.

JOBSTAR

This federally funded website is tailored to the California market, but its Salary Info link is a great tool no matter where you are. Placed on the home page, the link leads to roughly 300 industry-specific salary reports produced by professional organizations, publications or other niche websites. Think of the JobStar site as an online library to find professional groups nationwide, from geologists to graphic artists. But be warned: The quality of the reports varies greatly. Smart users will contact sources directly for more details.

WAGE WEB

If you're just looking for a quick hit of stats, Wageweb is very simple to use--but that's because there's so little free information there. The free reports for roughly 170 job titles are organized under eight broad categories (administrative, engineering, sales/marketing and so on) listed on the home page. For a $169 to $219 annual fee, members can obtain more detailed reports. However, since the data comes from Wageweb subscribers and others, pay figures for any one job may come from fewer than 100 respondents.

CAREER JOURNAL

If finding sophisticated career advice matters more than salary data, this site, run by Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Wall Street Journal, is for you. The site's best features are articles that give incisive tips on, say, negotiating for a raise. Although there are some salary reports from reputable sources, such as the Treasury Management Association Journal, we found other data to be inconsistent and sometimes just plain useless. Many reports, for example, didn't break down salaries by region. In fact, the regional profiles link to general news articles about jobs in various areas, but not to specific compensation data.

COMPGEO ONLINE

This site is not free. Plus it's so ugly, it's tempting to log off immediately. (Was it the cluttered graphics or the prison-green, brown and purple color scheme that drove us to distraction?) Nevertheless, middle- to senior-level executives willing to ignore the poor design and spend some money can obtain extremely useful data.

The $39 reports don't offer much that can't be found on a free site. But when we spent $299 for a legal salaries report, we received a nearly 50-page trove of information that's normally used by human-resources departments and recruiters, with ranges of compensation for precisely defined jobs in various cities and towns nationwide. It also documented average pay increases and compared salaries by region and in public and private sectors.

You probably should download a sample to see what kind of information you'll receive for your money. That's because the explanation of what's contained in the reports at different price points can be quite confusing. This site gives you a chance to peek at the kind of information employers get all the time--but if slogging through mountains of detailed data gets you down, you may not appreciate the opportunity.