Someone has to count this properly.

Why it exists

Fifteen years in reward. I could evidence base pay to the pound. Then someone would ask whether our family leave was any good, and I’d say “let me look into that” and go and message three people I used to work with.

That’s not a benchmark. That’s a rumour with a spreadsheet next to it.

Nobody was collecting this stuff properly. Not to a standard definition, not often enough to be current. So every benefits conversation ended in a judgement call dressed up as a recommendation, and I dressed up a lot of them.

The benchmarks that did exist only told you what everyone else was doing, which is a great way to end up average on purpose.

So we built the version I wanted.

David Whitfield — founder

What lumi is

A benchmarking community for UK reward — every member contributes, and the pool is the product. lumi benchmarks the rest of reward — everything except base pay. Members answer a guided questionnaire about their own policies and practices, and in return see where they stand against everyone else contributing — with the peer group and the sample size attached to every figure.

It deliberately does not benchmark base salary. Salary surveys already do that, and do it well. lumi covers the rest of the package — the part that decides whether an offer is competitive once the salary is agreed, and the part nobody publishes.

Where the numbers come from

The baseline is the reward data of UK organisations that shared it with us directly, quality-assured metric by metric against our anchor register of graded published UK sources. As members join, the data they submit through the platform flows into the same pool. Every figure states what it is drawn from.

Nothing is scraped and nothing is bought. Every figure carries the number of organisations behind it, and when fewer than three organisations answered a question, lumi hides the whole card — on screen and in exports — so no single organisation's data can be worked out.

The full detail, including how the benchmark is built and where its limits are, is on the methodology page. The insights are free analyses drawn from the same data.

What we will not claim

lumi is early. It has been built and it works, but the benchmark is small compared to where it needs to be, and the metric register — what gets measured — is still being shaped by the organisations testing it.

• We do not publish figures we cannot cite.
• We hide any card fewer than three employers answered, even when it would make a better headline.
• We do not claim customers, logos or testimonials we do not have.
• We do not describe the data as live or real-time. Your position is recomputed whenever a member's data lands, and read fresh every time you open it, against a benchmark that changes as members contribute — which is a different and more honest claim.

If a figure on this site ever looks wrong to you, say so. hello@lumihr.co.uk reaches me directly.

For what we collect and how it is protected, see the data protection page and the Privacy Notice.