Two different measurements sit behind this site. Headcount benchmarks come from public professional profiles, classified job title by job title. Spend benchmarks come from companies’ own SEC filings. Neither is a survey, and nothing here depends on a company telling us anything.
Every company has a Finance team and an HR team. Almost none of them publish how big those teams are. So we count from the outside.
For each company we gather its public workforce signals: department tallies, and the real job titles behind them. No survey, no self-reporting, no login. A company never has to participate to be measured.
Each job title is read and placed in the ten-function SG&A map. Off-the-shelf department labels are wrong surprisingly often: about a third of labelled contacts move once you read the actual title. Procurement buyers filed under Finance. Whole Sourcing and Facilities teams hiding inside Operations.
The published level is the people we actually observed, capped at each company’s profile-visible workforce so stale records cannot inflate it. That makes every count a floor. It is why the share of SG&A leads on every page and the per-1,000-employees figure follows it.
Reported SG&A is not comparable across companies, because filers put different things in it. One company books distribution costs there; its competitor books them in cost of sales, and looks leaner for no operating reason at all.
So the spend pages use a normalized line: reported SG&A less the disclosed items that distort comparison, namely advertising, R&D, pension, stock-based compensation, restructuring and one-time items, plus logistics reclassed where a filer parks it in SG&A. What is left is the residual overhead line, on the same footing for every company in the peer set. Every adjustment traces to a number in the 10-K, and each company is compared against US-GAAP peers in its own sector rather than a broad average.
Where a company does not disclose a line, it is absent, not zero. That is why the advertising benchmark covers fewer companies than the SG&A one.
The paid census closes that gap: every person resolved from named public profiles, subsidiaries and off-platform population included, typically landing within 5 to 8 percent of true headcount. Start a benchmark or book a 20-minute intake.
Public professional profiles and public company records for headcount, and companies' own SEC filings (10-K and 10-Q) for spend. Nothing comes from a survey and no company has to participate.
No. Survey benchmarks depend on who chose to respond and on what each respondent counted. These pages measure the same way for every company whether or not it wants to be measured, which is why named outliers are visible rather than averaged away.
Because they are floors. We publish the people we can actually see in public profiles, capped at the profile-visible workforce; survey figures count everyone a respondent reports. Compare the share of SG&A across companies, which is like-for-like, and treat the per-1,000 figure as a lower bound.
Each page states its own as-of date, and the filed-spend pages carry each company's fiscal year end. Company briefings refresh as new filings land.
Yes, and the free version costs nothing: add your company on any benchmark page and we run it and email you the link. The paid census resolves every person, with your chosen peers, in about a week.
SG&A Benchmarking
