Insight
Reading a salary distribution: median, IQR, and bucket collapse
A median is one number; a distribution is a story. Here is how to read the chart that comes back from a search.
A salary search on Salary Freedom returns three things: a summary (count + median), an interquartile range (25th–75th percentile), and a histogram. Each carries different information.
The median, not the mean
We surface the median rather than the mean because compensation distributions are heavily right-skewed. A handful of very high salaries can pull the mean upward; the median answers "what is the typical earner getting?".
The interquartile range
The p25 and p75 numbers describe the middle 50% of the matched records. A narrow range means tight pay bands; a wide range means high variance — which often means seniority, location, or industry are dragging the distribution in different directions.
Bucket collapse
The histogram defaults to $10k buckets. When a bucket has fewer than 5 records, it merges with its smallest neighbor and the merged bar carries the combined count. You may end up seeing wider, fewer bars than the underlying data has — that is the privacy floor at work, not a rendering bug.