Why does Salary Confidential ask for 'fair value' compensation, and why is it mandatory?

Salary Confidential asks respondents to report two distinct sets of base numbers about compensation:

1. Actual compensation
   What you are currently paid today (base, bonus, equity value, total compensation). Equity is optional; the other three are not.

2. Fair value compensation
   What you believe someone in your current role should be paid today, given responsibilities, experience, and market context.

The fair value fields are mandatory because they help protect the accuracy and interpretability of the actual compensation data.

Anonymity helps, but it is not sufficient

Research in survey methodology shows that anonymity and confidentiality reduce social desirability bias and improve response quality.

However, anonymity alone does not guarantee accurate measurement. Bias can still arise from how respondents interpret questions and what they are trying to express.

A key risk: conflating “what is” with “what should be”

In compensation surveys, respondents may intentionally replace a factual answer with a normative one:

reporting what the role should pay instead of what they are actually paid.

It is a form of measurement error driven by interpretation. If only one compensation number is requested, some respondents try to “correct” what they see as an unfair or outdated salary.

Why Salary Confidential requires both fields

Separating actual compensation and fair value compensation distinguishes two different constructs:

• factual reporting (what you are paid)
• normative evaluation (what you think the role should pay)

This gives respondents a clear place to express judgment without distorting factual data. It also ensures all respondents answer within the same structure, instead of selectively blending the two.

We get something else from this too: the peer group's general sense of pay fairness in relation to everything they know about their roles and the context in which they operate. In our survey and poll reports, you'll see a data visualization for this perceived pay gap data.

Why this matters

Salary Confidential surveys are targeted to offer examples whose usefulness is rooted in the tight control over the sample rather than statistical representativity. The goal is accuracy conditional on participation.

In that context, the main risk is not too many questions, but results that appear credible while being systematically biased.

Requiring both actual and fair value compensation:

• reduces a predictable source of distortion
• improves interpretability of results
• adds context when comparing peer groups within a poll