FACTS ABOUT FINANSFORBUNDET’S SALARY CALCULATOR

What is included in the salary when we calculate it?

The pay level you will find in the salary calculator is defined as the fixed salary including flat-rate allowances, but excluding the employer’s pension contribution and the additional 1/12 of the average annual amount that is received as a single allowance etc. (does not include payments for overtime).

In other words, the pay does not include the pension contribution paid by the employer, nor does it include the holiday bonus.

From 1 July 2022, the employer’s pension contribution is typically 11.65 percent of the fixed salary, whereas the holiday bonus is 3.25 percent of the fixed salary.

To determine the total gross salary, the rule of thumb is, therefore, to multiply the pay level in the salary calculator by 1.149.

See the salary calculator here

What do ‘median’ and ‘quartile’ mean?

The salary calculator shows four different pay levels. The four levels are called the ‘lower quartile’, ‘median’, ‘upper quartile’ and ‘90 quartile’:

• The median indicates the salary/wage that the person in the middle receives if you analyse all the people included in the statistics and rank them in order. If you wish to compare your pay with the typical pay earned by someone with your profile, you need to look at the median.
• The lower quartile shows the threshold for the 25 percent with the lowest salary/pay.
• The upper quartile shows the minimum salary you must be earning to be among the 25 percent highest-paid.
• The 90 quartile shows the minimum salary you must be earning to be among the 10 percent highest-paid.

Perhaps you are wondering why we don’t just make a comparison with the average? This is because the average can be heavily skewed, even if few people have an abnormally high or low salary. As such, you may get an incorrect idea of the pay level generally. That is why the median tends to be used when creating salary statistics.

Where do the figures come from?

The salary statistics are based on actual salary data for all 68,000 employees in the financial sector.

Finansforbundet uses a brand-new revolutionary method where we link data from Statistics Denmark with the results from a questionnaire survey amongst Finansforbundet’s members.

In short, this means that we draw from Statistics Denmark’s registered data on salary information for all employees in the financial sector – whether or not they are members of Finansforbundet and whether or not they participated in the salary survey. This gives us a significantly larger foundation of data that is also based on actual salary reports.

This way we get statistics that are not just based on the 10,000 or so responses we have from the member survey. Instead, the statistics are compiled based on 68,000 people’s individual salary information – and notably the salary information that the employers themselves have reported to Statistics Denmark. This provides an incredibly high quality in the statistics.

In order for the data to be used to form the profiles in the salary calculations, the data is then processed in a non-linear regression model called GradientBoostingRegressor. The consultancy HBS Economics, via machine learning, has chosen the regression model that provides the most accurate results.