Privacy Policy

Effective as of August 27, 2026

Levels.fyi helps people understand what jobs pay and helps employers make competitive offers. People submit compensation data, compare pay, post in our community, create a candidate profile so employers can find them, and buy career services. Employers subscribe to compensation benchmarks and source candidates.

This Privacy Policy explains what personal information Levels Fyi Inc. (“Levels.fyi”, “we”, “us”, “our”) collects, how we use it, who we share it with, and the choices and rights you have. It applies to levels.fyi and our other websites, our mobile applications, our APIs and integrations, and our communications with you (together, the “Services”). Some products have their own additional notice, which we give you at the point of collection.

Terms defined in our Terms of Use have the same meaning here. As used in this Privacy Policy, the word “including” means “including but not limited to”, and any list of examples is illustrative rather than exhaustive. Levels Fyi Inc. is the controller of the personal information described here, except where we process information on behalf of an employer under our Data Processing Addendum.

Summary

• What you submit gets published, so that everyone can see it. Pay information has always been easier for employers to get than for the people being paid. We publish the compensation data people submit, free, so anyone can look up what a role actually pays before they negotiate, accept an offer or ask for a raise. That only works because people share: what you contribute is what the next person sees, and what they contributed is what you see.
• We publish your submission without your name or email address — but a pay record still shows employer, title, level and location, so please read what we can and cannot promise about anonymity.
• We also license that same published data to employers and other customers for a fee. That is our business, and it is what lets us keep most of the Services free for the people who submit. It carries the pay details, never your name, email address or contact details, and recipients are contractually barred from trying to identify you.
• Your candidate profile is only shared with employers if the Talent Pool is on. Recruiters can then see your profile and resume and contact you, and your details are copied into that employer’s recruiting system when they reach out.
• Demographic answers are optional and are used for pay-gap analysis, diversity insights and research.
• We use AI services to read documents and text you give us, such as resumes and offer letters. Our AI providers process this for us and do not use it to train their own models.
• You can delete your account yourself, and you can ask us for a copy of your information or to delete specific items.

Contents

• 1. Information we collect
• 2. How we use information
• 3. How we share information
• 4. Compensation data, de-identification and anonymity
• 5. Your choices and your rights
• 6. Additional information

1. Information we collect

What we collect depends on how you use the Services, and the Services change over time. You do not have to give us personal information, but without some of it we cannot provide the Services or answer your requests.

Where information comes from. Most of it comes from you. We also receive information from: employers that use our recruiting and offer tools and send us candidate information from their recruiting systems; business-information and data providers such as Apollo.io, which confirm that a work email belongs to the employer it claims and check whether a candidate’s employer has changed; fraud-prevention providers that score email addresses, devices and other signals; public and licensed sources such as United States Department of Labor filings, job listings, company information, social media platforms and other publicly available or licensed sources; affiliate and marketing partners including affiliate networks, publishers, influencers, promoters, joint marketing partners and event co-sponsors; and sign-in and linked services such as Google and Apple.

On our business pages we also try to identify visitors. On pages aimed at employers we use a service that attempts to identify business visitors from their network address and other signals, so our sales team knows which companies are interested.

Information about other people. We may offer features that let you invite colleagues or contacts, refer someone to a role, or share content with someone, and we collect the contact details you give us to deliver the invitation. Please do not give us someone else’s details unless you have their permission.

Workplace integrations. Your employer may connect a workplace tool to the Services, such as our Slack app. When it does, we receive the workspace and user identifiers that tool gives us, the email address of the person who installs it, and the questions asked and the answers we return. We use this to answer the question, to match you to your Levels.fyi account, and to show you your recent questions. Section 6 describes how long we keep these records.

Cookies and similar technologies. We use cookies, local storage, software development kits and pixels for three purposes: necessary (signing you in, keeping you signed in, remembering settings and consent choices, security and load balancing); analytics (understanding which features are used, diagnosing errors and recording sessions — we use Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Microsoft Clarity, FullStory, Plausible, Sentry and Firebase); and advertising (measuring our advertising, reaching people who have visited the Services and showing ads elsewhere — we currently use tags from partners including LinkedIn and Google, and may use others). You can manage non-necessary cookies at any time through Cookie settings, and we honor the Global Privacy Control signal.

2. How we use information

Providing the Services. Running your account, publishing and displaying compensation data and community content, running searches, delivering the Talent Pool and paid services, taking payments and providing support.

Producing compensation data and insights. Building the pay statistics, benchmarks, reports and data products described in Section 4.

Demographic insights. If you give us demographic information, we may use it across the Services, including to: produce pay-gap analysis, such as gender and racial or ethnic pay disparities; produce demographic analysis of jobs, employers, industries and content, including reports on employers that pay equitably or support particular groups; produce diversity, equity and inclusion metrics, ratings and insights; power search and filtering, including filtering employers or content by demographic attributes and associating content with demographic categories; support employer and employee diversity disclosures; personalise recommendations, content and job opportunities; and conduct and publish research.

Candidate profiles and the Talent Pool. If your candidate profile is available to employers, we use it to let employers and their recruiters find you, evaluate you and contact you, and to deliver their messages. See Section 3 for what is shared.

Verification, moderation and fraud prevention. Reviewing submissions and uploaded documents, applying a verified label, moderating community content, enforcing our Terms of Use, detecting fake accounts, spam, scraping and other abuse, and keeping the Services secure. Some of this review is automated, including scoring sign-ups with a fraud-prevention service and blocking accounts that score as high risk.

Artificial intelligence. We use artificial-intelligence services to read and structure resumes and uploaded documents, check and classify compensation submissions, moderate community content, answer questions about compensation data, and generate summaries, translations, descriptions and other content on the Services. Documents, images and text you give us — including resumes, offer letters, pay stubs and free-text notes — may be sent to our artificial-intelligence providers, which currently include Amazon Web Services (Amazon Bedrock), Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, and may include others. They process this for us under contract and do not use it to train their own models. You can ask us for a current list at privacy@levels.fyi. Automated tools also help us decide whether to hide or remove content, whether to apply a verified label, and whether a sign-up looks fraudulent; you can ask us to review a decision at privacy@levels.fyi.

Research and reports. We conduct and publish research about pay, the labour market, hiring and careers, including our annual pay report and industry analyses. We generally use aggregated or de-identified information for this, and we may survey users or work with third parties on research.

Communications and marketing. Sending service messages, responding to you, sending interview requests and reminders on behalf of employers if you use the Talent Pool, and sending newsletters and offers about our products. See Section 5 for how to control these.

Advertising and measurement. Measuring our advertising, reaching people who have visited the Services, and showing ads on other online services.

Improving the Services and building new ones. Analysing usage, running research and development, and creating, testing and launching new features, products and services, including products different from those we offer today. We also create anonymous, aggregated and de-identified information and use and share it for any lawful business purpose.

Legal and safety. Meeting legal obligations, responding to lawful requests, and establishing, exercising or defending legal claims.

With your consent, and for any other purpose we describe when we collect the information.

3. How we share information

Publicly. Compensation submissions are published without your name or email address. Community posts are published with the display name and profile details you have chosen, which may include your job title, employer or school. Public parts of the Services can be read by anyone, including search engines and automated agents.

With employers and recruiters, through the Talent Pool. If your candidate profile is available to employers, employers and their recruiters can see your profile, including your resume, work history, education, job-search status and preferences, work-authorization and any security-clearance status, compensation expectations, any demographic information you have given us, and your contact details including email address, phone number and links you provided. When an employer contacts you we send you the message, and we copy your profile and resume into that employer’s recruiting system and create a candidate or application record there; that copy belongs to the employer and is governed by the employer’s own privacy notice. We take steps to keep your profile from appearing to the employer you list as your current employer, but we cannot guarantee it, and recruiting agencies acting for that employer may still see it. You can withdraw your profile at any time in your settings; withdrawal stops future searches and outreach, but it does not recall information already given to an employer or copied into a recruiting system, and employers that already saved or contacted you may keep access for a period.

With customers of our compensation data products, as described in Section 4.

With service providers that process information for us and only on our instructions, for purposes including cloud hosting and storage, email and text messaging, payments, analytics and error reporting, session replay, customer support, scheduling, fraud prevention, business-information lookups, artificial intelligence, marketing operations and similar functions. You can ask us for a current list at privacy@levels.fyi.

With coaches, specialists and partners who deliver services. If you buy coaching, negotiation help, resume review, immigration screening or a similar service, we share what is needed to deliver it, which may include your resume, offers and compensation details. Some are independent contractors or partner firms under confidentiality obligations.

With advertising and analytics partners, as described under cookies in Section 1.

Employers’ websites and systems. If your employer or a prospective employer uses our recruiting, offer or benchmarking tools, information that employer sends us is processed for that employer and that employer can access it. Where the Services connect to an employer’s applicant tracking system, careers site or other systems, information may pass in either direction, and we may collect information about your activity in connection with those integrations using automated means such as application programming interfaces, cookies and web beacons. The employer is responsible for any notice and consent required by law.

People named in content. Users write about employers, teams and the people who lead them. We allow content that describes the workplace behaviour or performance of people in senior positions who are the public face of an organisation. We do not allow content that targets identifiable individuals outside that group, and you can ask us to review content that names you at privacy@levels.fyi.

For legal and safety reasons, with law enforcement, regulators, courts and other parties where we believe it is reasonably necessary to comply with law, enforce our terms, respond to a claim that content infringes someone’s rights, or protect the rights, property or safety of any person.

With professional advisors and in corporate transactions, including lawyers, accountants, auditors, bankers and insurers, and acquirers and other participants in, or parties evaluating, a merger, acquisition, financing, reorganization, sale of assets or similar transaction, including in a bankruptcy.

Otherwise with your direction or consent, and as described to you when we collect the information.

4. Compensation data, de-identification and anonymity

Compensation submissions are the core of the Services. Information derived from them — statistics, benchmarks, percentiles, reports and individual de-identified pay records — is what our Terms of Use call Salary Data. Here is exactly what we do with it.

• We publish pay data on the Services without your name or email address.
• We produce aggregate statistics, benchmarks, reports and demographic insights.
• We license Salary Data — including individual pay records, without your name or contact details — to employers and other customers through exports, dashboards, spreadsheets, our API and similar interfaces, for a fee.

What a licensed record contains. It carries the details of a submission — employer, job title, level, location, years of experience, dates, pay figures, any notes you wrote and any demographic information you gave us. It does not carry your name, email address, phone number or account identifier.

Why we can license it. When you submit compensation data you are choosing to publish it. The details in a licensed record are the same details we publish on the Services for anyone to see, without your name or email address. Under several state privacy laws, information you have chosen to make available to the general public is not treated as personal information, and that is the basis on which we license it.

What we still do to protect you. We do not attempt to identify the person behind a submission, except to check that our own protections are working, and we require every recipient by contract not to attempt it either. Where we share Salary Data onward, we impose the same restriction.

Enhanced privacy and anonymity. When you submit compensation data you can turn on Enhance Privacy and Anonymity. If you do, we automatically hide or generalise specific fields in your submission until we hold enough comparable submissions to show the full detail safely — which can mean withholding a figure, showing a range or an average instead of the exact value, or coarsening fields such as dates and locations. This option is off unless you turn it on. Where it applies, you may see a message on the Services telling you that details have been hidden for privacy.

What we can and cannot promise about anonymity. We work hard to keep submissions from identifying the people who make them, and we treat this as one of the most important things we do. But we cannot guarantee anonymity. A pay record shows an employer, a job title, a level, a location and a length of experience, and a community post shows the profile attributes you chose. Depending on your circumstances, that combination can narrow you to a small group of people — sometimes to one person, for example in a small team or an unusual role. Free-text notes you write are published as you wrote them, so please do not put your name, contact details or anything else identifying in them. The measures we use will not be perfect in every case, and there may be situations where someone can work out, or guess, who made a submission. We want you to understand that before you submit.

You can ask us to display less detail with your submission, and you can ask us to delete a submission. See Section 5.

5. Your choices and your rights

Your account. You can view and change your account information, profile, notification preferences and candidate profile in your settings, and you can delete your account there.

Your content. You can edit or delete your community posts. To delete a compensation submission or an uploaded document, or to change how much detail is displayed with a submission, write to privacy@levels.fyi.

Demographic information. Giving it is optional. You can change or remove it at any time in your settings.

Marketing email. Every marketing email tells you how to opt out. You can also change your notification preferences in your settings. You will still receive service messages about your account and your transactions.

Text messages. If you gave us a mobile number and turned on text messages, reply STOP to any message to stop them, or change your notification preferences. Message frequency varies, and message and data rates may apply.

Push notifications. Turn them off in your device settings.

The Talent Pool. Turn your candidate profile off in your settings at any time.

Advertising choices. You can limit the use of your information for interest-based advertising by blocking third-party cookies in your browser or using a privacy browser or ad-blocking extension; using our Cookie settings; using the platforms’ own controls, such as Google’s at adssettings.google.com and LinkedIn’s in your account settings; using industry opt-out programs such as the Network Advertising Initiative, the Digital Advertising Alliance and the AppChoices app; and limiting the advertising identifier on your mobile device in your device settings. You need to apply these settings on each browser and device, and we cannot promise every company we work with participates in these programs.

Everyone. Wherever you are, you can ask us for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, to correct it, or to delete it. Write to privacy@levels.fyi. We will not treat you differently for exercising these rights.

United States. Depending on where you live, you may have the right to know what personal information we collect, use and disclose; to get a copy of it; to correct it; to delete it; to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information and of targeted advertising; to opt out of profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects; to limit our use of sensitive personal information; and to appeal if we refuse a request. The categories we collect, our purposes and our recipients are set out in Sections 1 to 3. The sensitive personal information we collect is the demographic information you choose to give us, work-authorization or immigration status in a candidate profile, and information contained in documents you upload; we use it only as described in this Privacy Policy and not to infer characteristics about you for advertising.

Do we sell or share personal information? Two things are worth separating. First, we license Salary Data to employers and other customers for a fee. That is our business, and it is what allows us to give most of the Services away. What we license is the information you chose to publish — the same details anyone can see on the Services — and never your name, email address or contact details. Because you chose to make that information available to the public, several state privacy laws do not treat it as your personal information, and every recipient is contractually barred from attempting to identify you. We do not license or sell your identity, your resume or your candidate profile. Second, on the pages where we market our products, our advertising tags and our business-visitor identification service pass online identifiers and browsing activity to those partners, who may use it for their own purposes. Several state privacy laws call that a “sale” or “sharing” even though no money changes hands, so we tell you plainly that it happens. To opt out, use Your Privacy Choices, or send the Global Privacy Control signal, which we honor. We do not sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16.

How to exercise your rights. Write to privacy@levels.fyi or to the postal address in Section 6. We will verify your identity, usually by asking you to respond from the email address on your account. An authorized agent may act for you with written permission. We answer within 45 days and may extend once where the law allows. If we refuse, you may appeal by replying to our decision; if we deny your appeal you may contact your state attorney general.

European Economic Area, United Kingdom and Switzerland. Our legal bases are set out in the table in Section 2: contract, to run your account and deliver what you ask for; legitimate interests, to publish and produce compensation data, secure the Services, prevent fraud, improve the Services, conduct research and market our own products; consent, for non-necessary cookies, text messages, demographic and other sensitive information, and anywhere else we ask; and legal obligation. You can object to processing based on legitimate interests and withdraw consent at any time. You have the rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection and portability, and the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing that produces legal or similarly significant effects. We are appointing representatives in the European Union and the United Kingdom under Article 27 and will name them here; meanwhile write to privacy@levels.fyi. You may complain to your local supervisory authority. If an employer gave us your information, the employer decides how it is used and you can contact the employer or us.

6. Additional information

How long do you keep my information? We keep personal information for as long as we need it for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy, and then delete it or stop associating it with you. How long that is depends on the information and what it is for:

• Compensation submissions and community content stay on the Services indefinitely, because published pay data and community discussion are the substance of what we offer and remain useful long after they are posted. You can ask us to remove a submission, and you can delete your own posts.
• Your account and profile are kept while your account is open, and for a period afterwards so that we can complete deletion across our systems, resolve any dispute and meet our legal obligations.
• Documents you upload are kept for as long as they are useful for verifying and supporting the submission they relate to, and for handling any question or challenge about it.
• Candidate profiles and resumes are kept while your profile is available to employers and for a period afterwards, and we may remove or archive a profile that has been inactive.
• Employer and recruiter account information is kept for the term of our agreement with that organisation and for a period afterwards.
• Workplace integration records, including the identifiers, questions and answers we receive through our Slack app about people who use both that workspace and the Services, are kept for as long as we need them to answer questions, show you your recent questions and run the integration. We remove the link between your Slack account and your Levels.fyi account when your employer removes the app.
• Support messages and communications records are kept for as long as we need them to answer you, understand a recurring problem and keep a record of what was agreed.
• Server, security and analytics records are kept for as long as we need them to run and secure the Services, investigate abuse and fraud, and diagnose problems.
• Records we are required to keep, such as transaction and tax records, are kept for the period the law requires.

In deciding how long to keep something, we consider what we still need it for, whether you have asked us to delete it, whether it is published or has been shared with someone else, how sensitive it is, and whether we need it to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim or to comply with the law. Deleted information may persist in our encrypted backups until those backups are rotated out of service in the ordinary course.

How is my information protected? We maintain administrative, technical and organizational measures designed to protect personal information, including encryption in transit and at rest, access controls, logging and monitoring, and an independently assessed security program. The infrastructure that runs the Services is operated by our cloud providers, which are responsible for its physical security. No service can be completely secure. If we become aware of a security incident affecting your personal information, we will notify you and any regulator where the law requires it. To report a security issue, write to security@levels.fyi.

Where is my information processed? We are based in the United States and store and process personal information there. Our personnel and our service providers may access and process personal information from outside the United States. If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, this means your personal information is transferred to a country whose laws may not give it the same protection. We rely on the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses, and the United Kingdom addendum to them, together with additional measures where needed. To request a copy of the safeguards we use, write to privacy@levels.fyi.

Who can use the Services? The Services are intended for people aged 16 and over and are not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16, and we do not sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16. If you believe someone under 16 has given us personal information, write to privacy@levels.fyi and we will delete it.

How will you tell me about changes? We may revise this Privacy Policy from time to time by posting an updated version with a new date at the top. If we make a change that we believe materially reduces your rights or increases your responsibilities, we will notify you by email to the address on your account and/or by a notice on or linked from the Services before the change takes effect. We may give notice of changes in other circumstances as well. We encourage you to review this page from time to time. Your continued use of the Services is subject to the version of this Privacy Policy then in effect.

How do I contact you? Privacy requests and questions: privacy@levels.fyi. General: team@levels.fyi. Security: security@levels.fyi. Mail: Levels Fyi Inc., 548 Market Street, PMB 94830, San Francisco, CA 94104, United States.