Data architecture
Benchmark methodology
Every number published on the benchmark pages is a cell: one statistic (a percentile, mean, or count) for one specialty, one geography, one metric, and one year. This page describes the controls every cell must clear before it is published. Public cells show the year, geography, population, metric, and record count needed to interpret the comparison.
Four data tiers
Tier 1 — National benchmarks
National benchmarksThe primary tier: curated national physician compensation benchmarks (2025), multi-source, maintained per specialty. Percentile ladders (p10–p90) cover total compensation, base salary, bonus, annual wRVUs, pay per wRVU, and on-call pay for full-time incumbent physicians, with newly-hired and academic ladders published separately so an employer-type qualifier is always visible.
The public-record and contract-verified tiers below corroborate this tier and will progressively replace it as the contract-verified layer grows.
Tier 2 — Independent comparisons
CorroboratingCells in this tier provide independent cross-checks for the national benchmark layer. Three comparison families are in use:
- Per-clinician service volume, payment, and productivity-proxy distributions.
- Offered-wage records disclosed by employers for defined roles and locations.
- State and national wage percentiles for physician occupations.
Each family measures something different. A service-volume proxy is not a salary, and an offered-wage record skews toward specific employer types. ClauseLine keeps those categories separate and preserves exact provenance privately.
Tier 3 — Contract-verified
Contract-verifiedDe-identified data points contributed with explicit consent from real analyzed contracts. This is the highest-signal tier: each point comes from an executed or offered contract, not a survey response. The layer grows as physicians opt in; cells publish only after clearing the record floor below.
Tier 4 — Self-reported
Self-reportedComp-check submissions typed in by visitors. Lowest tier: unverified, self-selected, and treated accordingly. Self-reported points are never mixed into public-record or contract-verified cells; they form their own cells with their own tier label.
k-anonymity floors
No published statistic rests on fewer than 5 underlying records. Local cells (state or ZIP3 level) publish at 5 or more records; broader public cells publish at 25 or more. Every cell carries its record count (n) next to the number, so a thin cell is visible as a thin cell. Cells below the floor do not exist in the published table at all — they are not hidden, they are never written.
One-way publication
Benchmarks flow one direction: to physicians. Aggregated cells are published on this site. Row-level data — a contributed contract data point, a comp-check submission — is never sold, licensed, or shared with employers, staffing companies, recruiters, or data brokers. There is no employer-side product built on this data.
Derivation versioning
Each cell stores a versioned verification record: exact provenance, filter and mapping steps, and the computation that produced the number. When an input or derivation changes, the cell is recomputed and the verification record is updated with it.
What this is not
These cells are reference points, not appraisals. An offered-wage percentile answers a narrower question than a full compensation benchmark, while a service-volume proxy describes productivity rather than pay. The cell labels state which question each number answers.