Look at almost any salary page on this site and you'll see two headline numbers: a median and a mean. They're often close together, which makes it tempting to treat them as interchangeable. They're not, and picking the wrong one to anchor your expectations can leave you negotiating from a badly distorted starting point.
What each number actually measures
The median is the middle value: if you lined up every person in an occupation from lowest to highest paid, the median is the salary of the person standing exactly in the middle. Half the workforce earns more, half earns less. The mean (the average most people learned in school) adds up every salary and divides by the number of people.
For most everyday numbers — heights, ages, typical shopping baskets — the two are nearly identical. Salaries are different because pay distributions are skewed: a small number of very high earners at the top pull the mean upward, while there's a hard floor near zero at the bottom pulling it no further down. The result is that the mean salary for an occupation is very often higher than the median, sometimes by a wide margin, particularly in occupations with a big gap between junior and senior pay (management and senior professional roles being the clearest example).
Why this matters when you're job hunting or negotiating
If a job ad, a recruiter, or an industry report quotes an 'average salary' for your target role, it's worth asking which average they mean. A mean figure inflated by a handful of very high earners can make an entire occupation look more lucrative than the experience of a typical worker in it — useful for a headline, less useful for setting your own expectations.
The median is generally the more honest number for one simple question: what does a typical person in this role actually earn? That's why it's the figure we lead with on every job page, with the mean shown alongside it for context rather than instead of it.
A quick way to sanity-check any salary claim
If you only have one number and want to know how much to trust it: check whether percentile figures are available too (we publish 10th, 25th, 75th and 90th percentile bands wherever the underlying government data supports it). A wide gap between the 25th and 75th percentile tells you pay for that role varies a lot by employer, region or seniority — and that the single headline number, median or mean, is only ever a starting point for your own research, not a guarantee of what any specific employer will offer you.