Your Senior Engineer in Lisbon Costs $47K Less Than Your Senior Engineer in Denver.
Benchmark pulls back the curtain on what distributed teams actually pay — role by role, region by region, percentile by percentile. Stop losing hires to blind guessing.
Median salary gap for the same role across top remote-hiring cities
| Role | Denver (US) | Lisbon (PT) | Berlin (DE) | Differential |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Senior Engineer | $178K | $131K | $118K | -$47K vs Denver |
| Staff Engineer | $224K | $162K | $148K | -$62K vs Denver |
| Product Manager | $162K | $108K | $98K | -$54K vs Denver |
| Data Scientist | $155K | $112K | $105K | -$43K vs Denver |
| Head of Design | $148K | $101K | $95K | -$47K vs Denver |
| Engineering Manager | $215K | $155K | $142K | -$60K vs Denver |
All figures are total cash compensation (base + bonus). Data from 1,847 companies as of Feb 2026.
Median annual savings after adopting geo-adjusted comp bands
Across 214 distributed companies that switched to location-indexed compensation in 2024–2025. Measured as reduction in overpayment relative to local market P50.
How the data is built
Anonymized submissions
Companies contribute data anonymously. Individual salaries are never exposed — only aggregated ranges.
Trimmed-mean methodology
We strip outliers using IQR trimming before publishing any figure. No single unicorn comp distorts your band.
Weekly refresh cadence
Data refreshes every 7 days. If the market moves, your bands move with it — not 18 months later.
Verified company size
Only companies with 10+ employees on a given role-region pair are included in that cell's calculation.
Average improvement in offer acceptance rate across Benchmark customers
"We were bleeding candidates at the offer stage. After adopting Benchmark's geo bands, we stopped guessing and started winning."
"We built our first comp bands in 3 hours using Benchmark. Previously that would have been a 6-week consulting engagement."
"Candidates used to ghost us after salary discussions. Now we open with data-backed ranges and close 3x faster."
Join 1,847 companies who stopped guessing and started knowing.
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