This information was provided by individuals, not by companies. When YOU are asked about your salary and bonus are you completely honest? These data are subject to three types of distortion (1) intentional, by individuals seeking to upwardly distort the results with the hope that their management will read the survey and get the impression that IT pay is higher than it actually is (2) more innocent "rounding up" of my salary, size of my raise, and size of my bonus --- as others have noted, the pay levels, prevalence of bonuses and size of raises reported here are much higher than validated sources of employer-provided pay data from Gartner, Mercer, and firms that are in the business of gathering and selling benchmarking data (3)people who choose to participate in surveys are different than those who do not. This survey sample is "large" but it is not representative of the broad IT talent market because it is limited to self-reported data. In fairness, I should point out that I work for one of the big HR consulting firms that is in the business of salary surveys.