How the Startup Finance Salary Database was built

Which companies and roles

Every company is a startup in the Story Recruitment Australian Startup Funding Database. That is where industry (tech, deep tech, fintech, other), funding stage and head-office city come from. We grouped titles into seven finance roles: CFO, Head of Finance, Financial Controller, Finance Manager, FP&A and finance analyst, Accountant, and Payroll.

Where the figures come from

• Job-ad bands (57). Finance job ads these companies posted from 2023 to 2026, collected from job boards and the companies' own hiring pages. About 1 in 19 of those ads carried a salary band; only those are here. The figure is the band the employer advertised.
• Reported salaries (199). For each finance role a company advertised, we searched "what are reported salaries for [role] at [company]" and kept each figure with the page it came from and the year that page gives. So far 693 of 693 role and company pairs have run.

What we kept and what we left out

• Kept: figures for the exact role at that company, and for a near finance role at the same company, tagged so you can filter.
• Left out: market-wide averages, figures for other companies, non-finance roles, figures covering "all roles", and any figure not in Australian dollars or not for an Australian role.
• Base salary only. Every figure was checked for what it measures. 122 figures that were total pay or total compensation (base plus bonus, stock or super), a single pay component such as a bonus or "additional cash and stock pay", or that did not say whether they were base or total, are left out of every figure and median.
• Pay at the company only. SEEK company salary pages show some roles from that company's own past job ads and others as an industry estimate, the average for the role across the whole industry. Every figure cited to one of those pages was checked against SEEK's own label. 28 industry estimates, or roles the cited page does not list, are left out of every figure and median.
• Annual figures outside A$30,000 to A$800,000 were treated as misreads and dropped.
• Day, hourly and monthly rates are listed but never converted to an annual figure.
• 115 figures that appeared as both a job ad and a reported salary were counted once.

How to read it

• The median is the median of each figure's midpoint. It shows only when 3 or more separate source pages back the cell. Smaller cells show their figures but no median.
• Year is the year the source states. A figure with no stated year shows "Not stated" and drops out of any year filter.
• City is the job's city where the source gives one, otherwise the company's head office, marked (HQ).
• Limits. Advertised bands skew to the roles employers are happy to price in public, which is mostly accountant and analyst roles. Senior seats (CFO, Head of Finance) are rarely advertised with a band, so those cells are thin. Reported salaries depend on what the source page says and how recently it was updated. Read a cell as evidence, not as a market rate.

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