Our data & sources
Employers have always known what everyone earns. Workers have always had to guess. Rung exists to end that imbalance - and that only works if every number we show you is real. No estimates dressed up as facts, no recycled survey folklore, no figures we can't stand behind.
When you walk into a pay review, the company across the table has payroll data, benchmarking consultants and years of negotiation practice. You get one conversation a year and a salary figure your mates are too polite to share. That's not a fair fight.
A salary figure is only power if it's true. Walk in with a number you can't defend and you've lost before you sit down. So we hold ourselves to a simple standard: we only show you numbers we'd stake our name on - and when we don't know, we say "we don't know".
The UK's official earnings survey, drawn from employer payroll records. The backbone of our UK percentiles by occupation, region and experience.
Aggregated pay data straight from the tax system - what employers actually report paying, not what surveys hope they pay.
Advertised salaries from partners including Reed and Adzuna, keeping figures current between official releases.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics' occupation-level wage percentiles by state and metro area. Official, free, and authoritative.
As we add countries, we anchor each one to its official statistics body first (like Ireland's CSO), then layer live listings on top - never the other way round.
Generated directly from our data warehouse - the same tables that power every figure in the product. Official statistics update on their publishers' (typically annual) schedules; job listings are ingested on a rolling schedule between releases.
If we don't hold verified data for your role and region, we say so - plainly. You'll see an honest "not available" before you'll ever see a made-up median. Even our AI tools are locked to verified market data: no fabricated figures, full stop.
Every figure carries its sample size. Where a sample is small, we label it as indicative and dim it - because a median built on a handful of records isn't a fact, it's a hint.
We never pass one country's figures off as another's, and we never silently convert currencies. UK figures come from UK records; US figures from US records.
Official statistics anchor everything; live listings keep it fresh; and where figures are derived from broader aggregates, we tell you. You always know what you're looking at.
Rung isn't a recruiter's tool or an employer's benchmarking service. We work for one side only: yours. Real data, honestly labelled, so the next time pay comes up, you're the best-informed person in the room.