Transparency
Data sources & methodology
This site adds nothing to the data except presentation. It holds no figures of its own, estimates nothing, and fills no gaps. Everything below is what it fetches, from whom, under what licence, and what you should be careful about when reading it.
The rules this site follows
- Every figure is fetched live from a public API and carries the year the source reported it. Nothing is typed in by hand.
- Missing data stays missing. Where a country has not reported a figure, it is blank — never interpolated, never carried forward from an earlier year, never shown as zero.
- If an API fails, the page says so rather than showing a stale or partial number as though it were current.
- If a number cannot be fetched and dated automatically, it is not presented as live. Statutory retirement ages are the worked example: the authoritative source publishes them as a periodic report, so this site links to that report instead of copying figures that would silently go stale here.
Sources
World Bank Open Data
Indicators are compiled from national statistical offices and UN agencies; the latest available year differs by country and by indicator, and every figure on this site is labelled with its own year.
Eurostat
Minimum wage coverage is limited to EU member states plus a few associated countries, and only to those that operate a statutory national minimum wage — countries where pay floors are set by collective bargaining (such as Austria, Italy, Denmark, Finland and Sweden) correctly appear with no value rather than a zero.
OpenHolidays API
Covers a defined list of mostly European countries plus Brazil, Mexico and South Africa — not the whole world. Cross-country counts on this site include nationwide holidays only, so regional-only observances are excluded to keep the comparison like-for-like.
OECD Pensions at a Glance
Statutory pension ages are published by the OECD as a periodic report table, not as a live machine-readable feed. This site therefore links out to the OECD's own published table rather than restating figures that could silently go stale here — every other number on the retirement page comes from the live World Bank API.
Indicator codes used
Each of these can be queried directly against the source API — the codes are given so you can check any figure on this site yourself.
| Code | Indicator | Unit |
|---|---|---|
NY.GNP.PCAP.PP.CD | Average income per person (PPP) | international $ per year |
SL.TLF.CACT.ZS | Labour force participation rate | % of population aged 15+ |
SL.UEM.TOTL.ZS | Unemployment rate | % of the labour force |
SP.POP.DPND.OL | Old-age dependency ratio | people aged 65+ per 100 working-age people |
SP.POP.65UP.TO.ZS | Population aged 65 and over | % of total population |
SP.DYN.LE00.IN | Life expectancy at birth | years |
PA.NUS.PPP | PPP conversion factor, GDP (local currency per international $) | used by the salary comparison |
earn_mw_cur | Monthly minimum wage (Eurostat dataset) | euro per month |
Known limits
Purchasing power figures are whole-economy averages and do not describe any particular city — capital cities are typically more expensive than the national average they sit inside. Labour statistics are modelled ILO estimates, which smooth over national definitional differences and are better for comparing countries than for tracking a single country month to month. Holiday coverage is limited to the countries the upstream service supports, and counts calendar holidays rather than statutory paid leave. None of these limits are hidden on the pages themselves.
Privacy
There are no accounts, no cookies, no ads and no third-party trackers. The only measurement is anonymous page-speed data from Vercel Speed Insights, sampled on about one visit in two: load times and the page address, with no cookies and no personal identifier. All upstream data is fetched server-side, so your browser never contacts any of the data providers listed above, and nothing you type into the comparison tool leaves your device.