Experian also sells a similar product

I actually run a product in this space in Europe as part of my portfolio. To echo your recommendation point; How we do it is pretty much the industry works. We give the low, mid, and high points in our data set based on what variables you input. We get the data from salary surveys and government data sets.

It’s all very boring and above board.

If companies choose to talk to each other to suppress salaries, they’re not using our tooling to do it.

There are also firms that will do all this work for you especially if you lack enough people in your own offices for an internal benchmark. If you’re building a CAD tool you can tell them (paraphrasing) to pretend you’re just like Autodesk and ask how much you should pay a UI designer.