Listing pay data cannot support a purchasing-power comparison
Of 20,851 listings read on 2026-10-31, 1,451 state pay, only four countries reach 30 of them, and the export records no currency or pay period.
Hired Creative's listings cannot be used to compare creative pay across countries by purchasing power. In the export read on 2026-10-31, 1,451 of 20,851 listings (7.0%) carry a stated salary figure, and three sources supply 78.1% of them. Only four countries have 30 or more such listings placed to one country, and the export has no currency or pay-period field. This piece sets out what those facts rule out. It says nothing about whether creative pay is higher or lower in one country than another.
Key points
- Of 20,851 listings in Hired Creative's export, 1,451 (7.0%) state pay, and three sources supply 78.1% of those, so the 7.0% reflects our boards, not the market.
- Only four countries have 30 or more placed pay listings, under a rule-based placement: United States 744, United Kingdom 234, Canada 91 and Philippines 33.
- The export records no currency or pay period, so converting pay by purchasing power would need a currency guess for each listing.
- In the United Kingdom, the median annual-looking pay is 47,500 on one board (207 listings) and 71,165 on another (16). The data do not show why.
What the export covers
Pay is a minority field in our data. The 7.0% is a property of the boards Hired Creative reads, because only some boards publish a salary. Three of them, remoterocketship (820 pay listings), reed (208) and jobicy (105), account for 78.1% of all listings with pay. Any gap between countries in this data is first a gap between boards, and has to be ruled out as one before it is read as a fact about a market.
Of the 1,451 pay listings, 1,230 (84.8%) could be placed to exactly one country from their location text. The other 221 could not: 94 named several countries or were unclear, 81 had no location text, and 46 gave only a region or "worldwide". Placement is rule based, and a hand check of 40 random placed listings found the right country in all 40. That sample is small.
Four countries clear the minimum
Hired Creative applies a minimum of 30 pay listings per country before showing a country on its own. Four countries pass. The other 21 countries with any placed pay listing fall below 30.
Show the numbers
| Country | listings | Listings (n) |
|---|---|---|
| United States | 744listings | 744 |
| United Kingdom | 234listings | 234 |
| Canada | 91listings | 91 |
| Philippines | 33listings | 33 |
Source: Hired Creative listings export, 2026-10-31 (n=20,851; 1,451 with stated pay). 1,230 of the 1,451 pay listings were placed to one country. Countries below 30 are pooled.
The four are also dominated by single boards. Of the 744 United States pay listings, 588 come from remoterocketship. Of the 234 United Kingdom listings, 208 come from reed. Of the 33 Philippines listings, 30 come from remoterocketship, and of the 91 Canada listings, 49 do. A comparison of these countries is therefore, in large part, a comparison of the boards that happen to publish pay for them.
Scale and period cannot be read from the numbers
The export has no currency column and no pay-period column. The stated figures themselves point to mixed scales.
In the United States, 728 of 744 pay listings have a mid-point of 30,000 or more, which looks annual. Six United States listings, all from one board, have mid-points under 500, for example 18 to 27, which looks hourly.
The Philippines figures spread more widely. Of 33 pay listings, 5 have a mid-point under 5,000, 23 fall from 5,000 to 29,999, and 5 are 30,000 or more. Mid-points run from 1,357 to 54,000. With no period or currency field, the scale and the period of these figures cannot be told, and this piece does not say which are monthly or annual.
The same country, different boards
Within one country, stated pay differs by board. Among United Kingdom listings with annual-looking mid-points, the median is 47,500 on reed (n=207) and 71,165 on remoterocketship (n=16). The second group is small.
Show the numbers
| Board | Value | Listings (n) |
|---|---|---|
| reed | 47,500 | 207 |
| remoterocketship | 71,165 | 16 |
Source: Hired Creative listings export, 2026-10-31 (n=20,851). Currency is not recorded. Mid-points from 10,000 up to 1,000,000 only.
The data cannot say whether this gap comes from currency (pounds against dollars), seniority mix, or pay level. The data also cannot say how much of a three-country comparison would come from currency, board or seniority mix rather than purchasing power, because currency is not recorded for the remoterocketship and jobicy listings.
What a purchasing-power conversion needs
The World Bank indicator PA.NUS.PPP is a purchasing power parity conversion factor, expressed as local currency units per international dollar. Applying it to a listing requires knowing which currency that listing's figure is in. The export does not record it.
The factors also differ widely between these countries. For 2024 the World Bank values are 1 for the United States, 1.15 for Canada, 0.66 for the United Kingdom and 19.3 for the Philippines, so the factors alone differ by up to about 19 times between the United States and the Philippines.
A statistical check does not rescue the comparison. With four countries, an exact rank correlation cannot reach a p-value under 0.05, so no ranking of countries by adjusted pay could be tested, and none is published here.
Method
Data: the Hired Creative listings export read on 2026-10-31, 20,851 listings. A listing counts as having stated pay if its salary minimum or its salary maximum is above zero. A zero in one bound is treated as a missing bound. The mid-point of a listing is the average of its non-zero bounds.
Placement: each pay listing is assigned to one country, or to none. The reed board is treated as United Kingdom only, which the location text of the reed listings in the 40-row hand check supports (all were United Kingdom towns). For other sources, a country is taken from a country name, a country suffix or a known city in the location text. Listings naming several countries, giving only a region or "worldwide", or giving no location text are not placed. The hand check read 40 randomly chosen placed pay listings against their location text.
Minimum sample: 30 pay listings per country. Countries with fewer than 30 listings, and any whose separate reporting could identify a sensitive location, are pooled.
Bands: mid-points are grouped as under 500, 500 to 9,999, 10,000 to 29,999 and 30,000 or more for the scale counts, and as under 5,000, 5,000 to 29,999 and 30,000 or more for the Philippines. The word "annual-looking" means a mid-point of 30,000 or more in the scale counts, and from 10,000 up to 1,000,000 in the board medians. These labels describe the size of a number. They are not a finding about the period it covers.
Board comparison: the median of mid-points by board within the United Kingdom, annual-looking mid-points only.
Purchasing power: the World Bank indicator PA.NUS.PPP (PPP conversion factor, GDP, local currency units per international dollar), latest non-empty value in the data file for each country, which is 2024 for all four. The data file was last updated 2026-10-08 and was retrieved on 2026-10-31. No pay figure was converted.
Tests: no significance test was run. With four countries, an exact rank correlation cannot reach p below 0.05. No permutation or bootstrap interval was computed.
Limits
- This piece shows that the pay data cannot carry a cross-country purchasing-power claim. It does not show that creative pay is similar or different between countries.
- The 7.0% describes the boards Hired Creative reads. It is not a share of creative jobs in any market.
- Advertised ranges at one snapshot are not what people earn. The piece makes no claim about change over time.
- Country placement is rule based, and the 40-row hand check is small. The United Kingdom count depends on reed listing only United Kingdom roles.
- Three of the four countries that pass the minimum are high-income, English-speaking markets, and four countries are too few for any ranking.
- Describing a figure as annual-looking or hourly-looking is an inference from its size. The export does not record the period.
- A critic could say that the United States, United Kingdom and Canada alone could be compared by purchasing power. Doing so would need an assumption about currency that the export does not confirm.
- The United Kingdom board gap rests on 16 listings on one side.
Sources
- PPP conversion factor, GDP (LCU per international $), World Development Indicators, World Bank
- World Bank PA.NUS.PPP country data, 2023 to 2024
- Hired Creative listings export, read 2026-10-31 (20,851 listings).