Benefits and Compensation

Measures of Central Tendency (a.k.a. Mean, Mode, & Median)

By Sharon McKnight, CCP, SPHR

Finding the middle ground is important for a lot of things, and for a lot of reasons, including salary data. For example, when researching salary data, it’s important to know whether you’re looking at the mean, the mode, or the median. All three are measures of central tendency but they’re not all the same thing, much less the same number.

Measures of central tendency are indicators of the center salary in a list of salaries. They represent the most typical value and they provide information about other points within the set of salary data. They help compensation professionals to make sense of the raw salary data but they do not, however, provide information about how dispersed the data are.

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