How CheckFairPay builds its Malaysian salary benchmarks

Where the data comes from

The CheckFairPay market database aggregates Malaysian salary and hiring-market observations: advertised pay disclosed in the open market, published market benchmarks, and public labour statistics. No individual employer or user record is ever exposed, and we do not resell or republish any third-party dataset.

Most weight comes from advertised pay observations, which track the current market faster than annual survey reports. A minority of rows come from published market benchmarks rather than observed distributions, so percentiles should be read as market benchmarks, not a census.

How roles are normalised

Raw job titles are noisy. We strip employer branding, location suffixes, contract markers and requisition codes, then map the remaining title to a canonical role. Titles that stay ambiguous after cleaning are excluded rather than guessed.

Each canonical role is assigned a seniority level (Intern through Director+) from title wording, and grouped into a role family so career-ladder comparisons stay like-for-like.

Percentiles, not averages

We publish P10, P25, median (P50), P75 and P90 monthly gross figures. Percentiles resist distortion from a handful of unusually high or low offers in a way that a simple average does not.

Read them as: P10 is near the floor of the market, the median is the typical offer, and P90 is what strong candidates in demanding employers command.

Sample size and confidence

A role needs at least 15 observations before we treat it as high confidence and publish it as a standalone indexable page. Below that threshold, figures remain visible in the product but are marked low confidence and kept out of search indexes.

Low confidence usually means the role is niche, newly emerging, or advertised without pay by most employers — not that the number is wrong, only that it is thinly supported.

Advertised, basic and total compensation

Figures are monthly gross basic pay unless stated otherwise. They exclude bonuses, commission, equity, shift allowances, overtime and employer EPF contributions.

Total compensation can sit materially above the basic figure, particularly in sales, oil and gas, and senior technology roles. When comparing an offer, compare basic against basic first.

Update cadence

The corpus is refreshed in periodic snapshots rather than in real time, and benchmarks are recomputed as new observations land.

Pages show the current market view. Year-on-year figures before the current period are back-cast estimates of the trend, not directly observed history, and are labelled as estimates.

Known limitations

Advertised ranges can be aspirational or deliberately wide. Some sectors under-disclose pay entirely, which biases coverage towards employers that do publish.

Geographic granularity is limited: Klang Valley roles dominate the corpus, so nationwide figures skew towards Kuala Lumpur and Selangor pay levels.

Treat every figure as directional evidence for a negotiation, not as a valuation of an individual.