Payscale Compensation Data

A subscription to Payscale is included for Premium and Pro members. Essential and Small members must purchase a subscription for access. All subscription types must participate and submit their data before their account can be activated. Payscale is not available to non-members. Non-members that wish to take advantage of the deep discount available for members are encouraged to purchase a Cascade membership.

No.  Payscale is replacing our Regional Pay Survey and is just a single source of compensation data.  Our team puts together a comprehensive report utilizing multiple data sources.  When making important decisions that will impact your business, it’s important that you utilize multiple sources of data.  Payscale is a great resource for data, but it’s only one data point and not sufficient for a full market analysis.  We recommend utilizing at least three different market sources to ensure that you are accurately capturing the market for your role.  Further, our team helps you develop your full compensation program including your philosophy, structure and ensuring pay equity.

Payscale has replaced Cascade’s traditional Regional Pay Survey. All past participants or purchasers of the Regional Pay Survey are encouraged to participate in Payscale to boost the regional data set available in Payscale and to get access to thousands of job matches for compensation benchmarking.

Once we receive your purchase order (Essential or Small member) or your request to participate (Premium or Pro member), we will follow up with an Excel sheet template and instructions on how to participate. Once completed, you can submit your finished sheet via email or secure upload site. Cascade will then review your submission to ensure completion and no errors, then will turn on your Payscale access.

• We will provide a spreadsheet with the information required. This will include company demographic information like industry type, number of employees, etc. and internal compensation data. This will include employee ID or name, job title and job code, base salary information, bonus data (where relevant), full time status, and date of hire.
• Data is collected by incumbents (individual employee record) rather than average per position. This allows the Payscale data to be a true average rather than an average of an average.
• Compensation data should be reported as either Hourly or Annual. We do not accept monthly, weekly, biweekly, etc.
• Companies are expected to submit at least 70% of their internal compensation data. Jobs will be matched to Payscale positions once uploaded to the site.

Our access is on a January to December cycle, so you are purchasing access from your date of purchase until December 31st.

Payscale’s data is refreshed daily with eligible data available to enter the common data pool. By that, Payscale holds data entered for 90 days before adding it to the larger database to meet DOJ’s antitrust guidelines. So you may not see compensation data entered on a particular day but you will see the freshest data that is in line with antitrust guidelines.

Yes! One of the reporting options in Payscale allows you to select other organizations by name that you want to use to create your market average. This is a great option to make sure you are looking at averages and being competitive with data from your business rivals.

Payscale’s report is in line with DOJ antitrust guidelines. When choosing competitor names to create your average, you will have to select a minimum of 5 organizations in order for the report to be run. If you try to run the report multiple times in order to back into a specific organization’s compensation data, your account will be flagged and reporting halted. There is also a dominance diffusion threshold, that if an organization’s data makes up too large of a percentage of the average, the report will require you to add more organizations to reduce that impact.

Contact surveys@cascadeemployers.com if you forgot your login for the Payscale site.

Contact surveys@cascadeemployers.com if your Payscale login is no longer working. You may want to check if your membership status with Cascade has lapsed or if your data submitted to Payscale hasn’t been updated in over a year. Our team will be able to help identify what is needed to reinstate your access.