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3 minute read
Most salary benchmarks hand you one number. A median, maybe a range. No sample size, no spread, no methodology, no idea whether you’re looking at twelve signed contracts or twelve hundred. You’re expected to walk into a hiring conversation, a budget meeting, or a pay review and act on it anyway.
That’s the black box problem. And it’s why we rebuilt Curioz.
Twelve KPIs and a quality grade, per report
Every Curioz report ships with twelve statistical KPIs, not one. Median, percentile ranges, sample size, Gini index, CV timeline, standard-deviation timeline, and more. You can see the spread, the trend, and the depth behind the headline number before you decide how much weight it carries.
On top of that, every report includes a Data Quality grade: Precise, Good, or Fair. It’s a one-glance answer to the question that should come before any compensation decision, how reliable is this number, actually? A Precise grade means a deep, stable sample. Fair means handle with care. You get the truth, not a polished number with the uncertainty stripped out.
That’s the core change in v2. Not “trust us, here’s the number.” More like: here’s the number, here’s the math behind it, you decide.
Reports that bend to your question, not the other way around
Curioz reports are interactive and customizable, not a fixed PDF you download and squint at. Drill into the percentile that matters for your decision. Filter to the seniority, the skill stack, or the location that actually matches the role you’re working on. Pull only the slice of the market you need, rather than reading the same blanket benchmark as every other company.
This is what makes pay-as-you-go work. You’re not buying access to someone else’s snapshot. You’re configuring a report to your situation, and only paying for the ones you actually use.
What’s behind the number
Three live data sources, triangulated. Signed contracts from HR agencies. Real-time job postings. HRIS data shared by partners. None of them is enough on its own. Job ads tell you what’s offered, not what’s accepted; payroll tells you what’s paid, not what’s currently being negotiated; signed contracts tell you what people actually agreed to, but lag the offer market. Together they cross-check each other.
In the current dataset: 400,000+ data points, 1,000+ IT role and skill combinations, 10,000+ salaries processed every month. All focused on the Polish IT market specifically.
Monthly refresh, not annual
Annual salary reports are typically based on prior-year data, so they can lag fast-moving changes by several months. The Polish IT market doesn’t wait. As one example from our current dataset: active sample size for Senior Backend Developer (JavaScript + Node.js) in Poland was down 8.6% by February 2026 versus the prior comparable period. In our data, that may indicate softer hiring activity in this segment of the market. If you’re benchmarking against a report from last summer, you’d never see it.
Curioz refreshes monthly. The number you pull in May reflects May, not last September.
Browse the catalog, see a demo before you commit
The role catalog is open. You can browse what’s covered before paying anything: which roles, which seniorities, which skill stacks. Review the demo report (on the house) to see the structure, the twelve KPIs, and the Data Quality grade live, then decide whether the number is worth acting on. If the role you need isn’t in the catalog yet, tell us and we’ll prioritise it.
No sign-up barriers, no sales call, no paywall before you’ve seen what you’re getting.
Pay-as-you-go, no lock-in
Pricing got even more flexible, catered to your needs today. Pick a role and seniority, pay once, get three months of the latest data. Starting at 19.99 zł per role. No annual subscription, no minimum commitment, no sales call.
If you need ten reports this quarter and none next quarter, that’s fine. You pay for what you use, and you get exactly what you need.
Compare up to three roles side by side
Role Comparison takes the spreadsheet exercise off your desk. As soon as you have two reports in your account, you can put them side by side, up to three roles at a time, with the same twelve KPIs and the same monthly-refreshed data on every side. Senior versus Regular. Warsaw versus Kraków. The role you’re replacing, the one taking its place, and the one you’re considering instead. We’ll cover the details in a dedicated post soon.
What’s coming after that: Saved Reports, so you can return to a benchmark without rebuilding it, and Market Alerts, so the platform tells you when something in your bands moves. Both are in build.
Why now
The EU Pay Transparency Directive has been in force at EU level since 6 June 2023. Member states, including Poland, must transpose it into national law by 7 June 2026. Polish employers will have to base pay on documented, defensible structures and objective, gender-neutral criteria, and be able to explain them. The Directive doesn’t require external salary benchmarks. But reliable salary data makes designing and defending those structures substantially easier than reverse-engineering a position from screenshots of a user-generated platform or last year’s report.
The companies that go into the deadline with verifiable benchmarks will spend the second half of 2026 defending bands. The ones that don’t will spend it building them from scratch.
Take a look
Browse the catalog, pull a demo, run the report. The Data Quality grade tells you in one glance whether the number is solid enough to act on, and pay-as-you-go means you only pay for what you’ll actually use.