About the data
Peer Compare is In-Hand.in's crowdsourced salary database for India. Every number on Peer Compare and its company, role, and city pages comes from a real, anonymous, user-submitted salary entry — not from scraped job listings, HR surveys, or estimates. This page explains how the data is collected, validated, anonymized, and published.
What each entry contains
- Role, company, city, and years of experience
- Total annual CTC, with an optional breakdown into base, stock (RSU/ESOP), and bonus
- Whether employer PF is paid over and above CTC
No name, email, phone number, or sign-in is required to submit. The form collects only role, location, and salary structure.
How salaries are collected
Anyone can add their salary via the "+ Add salary" button on any Peer Compare page. Entries appear in the table immediately after submission. Many submissions come from users who have just computed their exact take-home on the In-Hand salary calculator, which means the CTC figures tend to be the real numbers from offer letters and payslips rather than rounded guesses.
Validation and data quality
- Sanity checks at submit time — unusual compensation structures (for example an implausible stock-to-base split) are flagged before they enter the dataset.
- Company name canonicalization — variant names ("TCS", "Tata Consultancy") are mapped to one canonical company so peer groups aren't fragmented.
- Bot and abuse defenses — automated submissions are filtered by rate limiting and bot-detection scoring, and the dataset is monitored for scraper and pollution attempts.
- Minimum sample thresholds — dedicated company/city/role pages exist only where enough entries have accumulated, and company-level scores require at least 12 CTC submissions. Small peer groups are never presented as authoritative.
Privacy and anonymity
- No personal information is collected with a salary entry.
- IP addresses are hashed (SHA-256 with a rotating daily salt) before any storage — raw IPs are never stored alongside submissions.
- Only aggregate views and individual anonymous rows (role + company + city + CTC) are ever shown.
What we publish
For every peer group (company, company + role, company + city, city) we publish P25, median (P50), and P75 CTC — percentiles, not averages, so a few outliers can't distort the picture. Companies with 12+ submissions also get Pay Volatility, Equity, Get Rich, Pay Spread, and overall Company scores — full score methodology here.
Limitations
The data is self-reported and skews toward tech and tech-adjacent roles in major Indian cities. The dataset is young and growing — where sample sizes are small, treat medians as indicative rather than definitive, and cross-check against other sources for niche roles.
Citing this data
The published benchmarks are free to browse and free to cite under CC BY 4.0.