What goes into the index, what is deliberately left out, and the rules that make each figure defensible. This is the page to read before you cite us.
Every salary figure is a trimmed median of CertBueno member contributions — the give-to-get pool. Members report the certifications they hold and their compensation; the index reads that one shared pool. Each person is counted once per certification, de-duplicated by a normalised email identity, so repeat or multi-account submissions cannot inflate a figure.
people = count(distinct contributors), never count(rows).
Salary is the member pool. Rank additionally reflects a hiring-demand signal and an AI-disruption read; the demand feed is shown as a relative 0–100 index and direction, with the live third-party feed pending a data license.
No figure is published for a certification until at least 10 distinct contributors have reported it. Below the floor the cell is blank — never rounded, estimated or shown as "approximately". This is enforced in the data layer, not the presentation: a sub-floor value cannot reach the page.
below 10 distinct people → no number, no exceptions.
Each published figure is a trimmed median: the top and bottom 5% of reported values are dropped before the median of the middle 90% is taken. This removes the outlier at each tail — the intern who over-reports, the principal who under-reports — so one extreme submission cannot move a certification's headline number.
We publish the top of band — the upper end of the pay range for the credential — clearly labelled as such, never presented as a measured average.
The index is rebalanced quarterly. The current edition is Q3 2026, published 2026-08-15. Each quarter's rankings are frozen at a permanent URL — https://certbueno.com/index/top-100-it/2026Q3/ — so a citation made today resolves to the same figures forever, even after the next rebalance moves the live rankings.
Rank is editorial. It blends top-of-band pay, hiring demand and AI-disruption exposure into a single ordering. It is deliberately not a straight salary sort: a certification can out-earn another and still rank below it because its demand is cooling or its skill is more exposed to automation. The verdict chip (INVEST / UPGRADE / DIVERSIFY / STABLE) summarises that read for each credential.