Employer-verified compensation data · Southeast Europe
Stop guessingwhat the marketactually pays.
CompensationX benchmarks real payroll from 150+ technology employers in Serbia, Croatia and North Macedonia — not survey guesses. See the gap between what you pay and what the market pays, role by role, in net, gross and total cost.
Free tier available to contributing companies. No card required.
Senior Backend Engineer · Serbia
Net monthly · 148 employer records
You pay
€3,190
Market mid
€3,800
Gap / person
−€610
Payroll contributed by teams inside
10,000+
verified salary records
150+
contributing employers
150+
benchmarked roles
2×
full refresh per year
The problem
Most salary data in this region is a survey.
Same role, two sources
Self-reported survey
spread ±38%
Employer payroll
spread ±11%
Illustrative. Both lanes hold the same number of records for one role — only the collection method differs.
Public IT salary reports are built from what individuals type into a form once a year. People round up, they report net as gross, they answer for a title that means something different at every company. You then make a six-figure payroll decision on it.
- 01
Self-reported, once a year
A few thousand individual responses, collected in one window, stale by spring.
- 02
No net / gross / gross-2 discipline
In this region the three numbers differ by more than 60%. Mixing them makes every comparison wrong.
- 03
Titles that don't map
One company's Senior is another's Mid. Without levelling, the median is noise.
The data
Payroll, submitted by the employer, twice a year.
Every record in CompensationX comes out of a real payroll system, submitted by the company that pays it, and re-submitted every six months. That is the same standard the global consultancies use — at a price a regional company can actually sign.
01
Employer-submitted
Finance and HR upload directly from payroll. No individual self-reporting, no anonymous form.
02
Net, gross and gross-2
All three figures captured separately, so a Belgrade number and a Zagreb number are actually comparable.
03
Levelled, not titled
Up to six seniority levels per role, mapped to a common scale before anything is aggregated.
04
Refreshed every six months
Mandatory re-submission. A benchmark you are reading in October is not a number from last January.
05
Suppressed below five companies
If fewer than five employers contribute to a cut, we return nothing. No cell in the platform can be reverse-engineered to one company.
06
Beyond base pay
Bonus structures, equity practice and 47 tracked benefits — because the offer is never only the salary.
The platform
One question answered: how far off are we?
Percentile tables are easy. Telling a CFO what to do about them is the product.
Your gap, in currency
Pick a target percentile. See exactly how many euros per month, per person and across the team you are below or above it — not a chart you have to interpret.
- Per person, monthly
- −€610
- Per person, annual
- −€7,320
- Across 24 people, annual
- −€175,680
Peer group of your choosing
Benchmark against seven named companies you actually compete with for candidates, instead of an industry average that includes nobody like you.
Filters that survive contact with reality
Industry, city, company size, remote policy, tech stack and funding stage — combined, with the suppression floor enforced at every step.
Benefits benchmark
What share of your peer group offers private health, a learning budget, a four-day week or full remote — and what it costs them.
Offer check
Before the offer goes out: where it lands in the market, what the candidate is likely holding, and what the counter will look like.
Range builder
Turn a benchmark into a published salary band with a defensible midpoint — the artefact you will need to show a regulator.
Free tools
Try it before you talk to anyone.
Three tools, open to everyone, no account. They return direction — the band, the sample behind it, and which side of market you are on. The exact midpoint, your gap in euros and the percentile table live inside the platform.
Compensation Review Simulator
Live belowEnter what you pay a role today. See the market band, how many payroll records stand behind it, and whether you sit below, within or above.
Run the simulatorSalary range generator
Get a defensible min–mid–max band for any role and level, formatted for a job ad that has to name a range.
Build a rangeOffer strength check
Paste an offer. Find out whether it reads as below, at or above market before the candidate does.
Check an offerCompensation Review Simulator
Backend Engineer · Senior · Serbia
185 payroll records
Below market
You sit in the lower third of the band.
Your exact gap, in euros
Pro- The exact midpoint for this cut
- Your gap to any percentile, in euros
- The 10 / 25 / 50 / 75 / 90 table
- The annual cost of closing it across your 24 people
Open to everyone: the band, the sample size and the direction you are off in. The exact midpoint, your gap in euros and the percentile table stay behind the login.
Free tools return a market band, its sample size and a directional reading. The exact midpoint, your gap in euros, precise percentiles, custom peer groups and filtered cuts are available to platform subscribers.
EU Pay Transparency Directive 2023/970
From June 2026, a range in the job ad stops being optional.
Croatian employers, and any regional company hiring into the EU, now have to publish pay ranges, drop salary-history questions, justify pay differences on objective criteria, and report the gender pay gap from 2027. Every one of those obligations needs a defensible number underneath it.
- Salary ranges published before the first interview
- Gender pay-gap reporting, with a remediation plan above 5%
- Objective, gender-neutral job levelling on record
- Employees entitled to ask what comparable colleagues earn
Compliance clock
2023
Directive adopted
June 2026
Transposition deadline
2027
First pay-gap reports
Obligations differ by jurisdiction — Croatia is in scope as an EU member state; Serbia and North Macedonia are not, though EU-headquartered groups often apply the standard across the whole region.
Annual report
The Southeast Europe Tech Compensation Report
One report a year, built from employer payroll rather than a survey form. Medians and spreads for every major engineering, product and data role, by market and by level, with the year-on-year movement.
Free · 40 pages · published each February
2026 edition · Southeast Europe
The Southeast
Europe Tech
Compensation
Report
Pricing
Published, because you asked what it costs.
Contribute your payroll data and the price drops. That is the whole model: the companies that make the benchmark good get it cheapest.
Contributor
For companies that submit payroll data every six months.
Free
- 5 roles of your choice
- Position and seniority filters
- Market median and quartiles
- Annual report, early access
Pro
Most chosenThe full benchmark for one company, one market.
€3,900/year
€1,900/year for contributing companies.
- All 150+ roles
- Industry, city, size, remote and stack filters
- Full percentile range: 10 / 25 / 50 / 75 / 90
- Gap-to-percentile in currency
- 47-benefit market report
- Range builder and offer check
Business+
Multi-market groups and regulated employers.
Custom
- Everything in Pro, across all markets
- Peer group of seven named companies
- Pay-gap reporting pack
- Job architecture and levelling support
- Multiple seats and export
- Named account manager
Questions
The ones that
decide it.
Anything not answered here we will answer on the call, including the awkward ones about who can see what.
Ask us directlyWhere does the data actually come from?
From the payroll systems of contributing employers, submitted directly by their HR or finance teams and re-submitted every six months. It is not scraped, not modelled from job ads, and not self-reported by individuals.
Can anyone see what my company pays?
No. Data is aggregated before it is ever displayed, and any cut with fewer than five contributing companies returns nothing at all. Your figures are never attributable, including inside a peer group you are part of.
How is this different from the public IT salary reports?
Those are surveys of individuals — a few thousand self-reported answers collected once a year. This is employer payroll from 150+ companies, refreshed twice a year, with net, gross and gross-2 kept distinct and seniority levelled to a common scale.
Do I have to contribute data to use it?
No. Contributing gets you a free tier and a substantially lower price on Pro, but Pro and Business+ are both available to non-contributing companies.
How long does onboarding take?
Most companies are live within a week. Data goes in as an Excel upload or direct entry, and we map your titles to the levelling scale with you rather than leaving you to guess.
Which markets are covered?
Serbia in depth, with Croatia and North Macedonia covered and growing. Coverage per role and market is published openly so you can see where the data is thin before you buy.
See your gap in fifteen minutes.
Bring three roles you are unsure about. We will show you where they sit against the market on the call — not in a follow-up email.