Why every salary site gives a different number — and the honest consensus, reconciled from six public sources with an open methodology. Every figure cited; nothing proprietary, nothing invented.
Search any testing-role salary in India and you get a different number from every site — ₹5 lakh here, ₹7 there, a confident ₹17 somewhere else. The numbers aren't wrong; they're measuring different things, and almost no one explains which. This report does the unglamorous work: it reconciles six public 2026 sources into one honest picture, shows its method, and cites every figure. The goal is the most trustworthy QA/SDET salary reference for India — not the highest number.
What this is, plainly: a transparent synthesis of public data, not a proprietary dataset. We did not run a survey or scrape profiles — we reconciled what reputable public sources already report, and we show our working. CareerIntel's whole premise is "verified, not hallucinated," so a salary report that hid its sources or invented a number would undercut the brand. Every figure below is cited with an access date; where sources conflict, we say so.
Methodology (read this — it's the point)
The single most useful thing to understand is why salary numbers disagree. They come from two kinds of source that measure different populations:
