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 actually is

A benchmarking co-operative for UK reward. Members answer a guided questionnaire about their own policies and practices, and in return see where they stand against the rest of the panel — 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 a reference panel of UK organisation profiles, built from graded published UK survey sources and calibrated metric by metric against our anchor register. As members join, the data they contribute joins the pool alongside it. Every figure states which it is drawn from.

Nothing is scraped and nothing is bought. Every figure carries the number of organisations behind it, and any figure resting on fewer than five organisations is never shown — on screen, in exports, or in a board pack.

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

What we will not claim

lumi is early. It has been built and it works, but the panel is small compared to where it needs to be, and the register of what gets measured is still being shaped by its first members.

• We do not publish figures we cannot cite.
• We do not show a number resting on fewer than five organisations, 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. It is recomputed nightly against a panel that changes when 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 how member data is handled, see security and data protection and the privacy notice.