Salary Index makes pay transparent across Nigeria without exposing the people behind the numbers. Here is how a salary goes from a submission to a public listing: how we source, verify, analyse, transform, anonymise and publish it. We publish the numbers, not the people.
1. Sourcing the data
Much of our data comes from professionals reporting their own pay through our form. The rest we draw from data already gathered elsewhere (public salary surveys, shared spreadsheets and community datasets) and from openly available sources like company career pages, pay a company has reported itself, and public reports and articles.
Entries range from anonymous self-reports to figures backed by evidence, and we label each one by how it reached us, so you always know how much weight a number carries.
What the source labels mean
- Verified means the salary was submitted by a professional and checked against supporting evidence such as a payslip, offer letter, work email or LinkedIn profile before publication. The evidence is used only for verification and is not published.
- Self-reported means the salary came from an anonymous professional submission or public survey response. We still clean, classify and sanity-check the entry, but it was not individually verified with supporting evidence.
- Public report means the salary came from a published compensation or industry report. We transform it into Salary Index's standard role, level, location and pay format before showing it.
- Public article means the salary came from a published article, blog post, newsletter or similar public write-up. We still extract only the compensation detail needed for comparison and remove unnecessary context before publication.
- Company job page means the figure came from a company's own careers page or public job post. We only name a company beside pay when the company itself has already disclosed the compensation publicly.
- Expert-reported means the figure was provided by a vetted industry expert, recruiter or operator with direct knowledge of compensation in that market. We review and standardise the entry before it appears publicly.
- Company-reported means the figure was provided directly by the company, or published by the company outside a job post. Company-reported figures are still normalised into our salary format before publication.
2. Verifying the data
When a contributor opts in, we use a work email, LinkedIn profile or payslip to confirm the submission is real, then discard it. None of that evidence is ever published or kept in the public dataset.
Every figure also gets a sanity check: anything implausible for the role is flagged before it goes live. A company is named alongside pay only when the company itself made that pay public.
3. Analysing the data
We classify each entry by what the role actually is (function, seniority, industry, location, company type), not by its job title. So a software engineer and a sales engineer never land in the same average just because both titles say “engineer.”
We also convert every pay structure into one comparable monthly figure: currency, gross or net, however bonuses are counted, all without rounding away the real number. Each entry stays an individual, anonymous salary listing: an exact figure with no person attached, browsable next to every other.
4. Transforming the data
Specifics that could single someone out get generalised. Free-text job titles map onto a fixed set of roles named by seniority tier and sub-track; duplicate labels are merged; notes are stripped of anything that could identify a person or trace a figure back to its source.
Only recent years go public. Older submissions stay in our internal archive, so what you browse reflects the current market.
5. Anonymising the data
By the time an entry is published, everything that could identify the person is gone and the revealing specifics are generalised into tiers and tracks.
A real employer name appears only when that company already published the figure itself. Otherwise the entry sits behind a label that describes the kind of company without naming it.
What we never publish:
- Names, email addresses or LinkedIn profiles
- Offer letters, payslips or any uploaded documents
- Your employer's name, unless the company itself disclosed the pay publicly
- Any free-text detail that could point back to a specific person
6. Publishing the data
Once an entry clears every step above, it goes live in two places: the browsable table of all salaries, and its own page with its own address, so a single listing can be linked to and shared on its own. Both show the same anonymised listing; the page adds no detail the table withholds.
These pages are public, which means a listing can be found through a search engine and not only by browsing the site. A link you share keeps pointing at the same listing.
If a listing is taken down, whether because you asked us to or because we found a problem with it, its page says so plainly instead of quietly turning into something else. And because only recent years stay public, a listing leaves the public site as its year ages out, even though nobody removed it.
7. Questions
Salary Index is operated by Paxizon Technologies Limited. For questions about how we handle data, or to have an entry reviewed or removed, contact us at paxizon@gmail.com.