Twenty years ago, Spinnaker’s CEO Phil Parry was approached by a large Singaporean tanker owner looking for robust and independent salary data for the shipping sector.
Back then, nothing of this nature existed for the maritime industry despite salary benchmarking being standard practice in other industries. As HR specialists know, there are many benefits that can be attributed to salary benchmarking including aiding retention, ensuring organisations are paying their staff in line with the market and helping with pay structures.
With this in mind, Spinnaker set up the ‘Maritime HR Association’, a members’ ‘club’, with the aim of helping organisations ensure that the salaries they offer are fair and competitive, which can in turn help attract and retain top talent.
The Maritime HR Association has grown to over 110 member companies, mainly shipowners, shipmanagers and oil majors, all of whom benefit from taking part in Spinnaker’s annual salary survey and receiving the final salary reports. These reports cover pay, bonus and total compensation and are released every October.
Supplementary reports also cover benefits such as non-cash perks, life and health insurance, pension plans, long service awards and flexible benefits schemes.
The 2026 salary reports included salary data from 39,000 individuals across 116 countries.
Quite understandably, many companies have reservations when it comes to sharing salary data and some of the questions we are commonly asked by clients include:
Will other companies know what we pay?
Quite simply no. The data in the reports is presented in an aggregated format in percentiles (P10, LQ, Median, UQ and P90). Company names are shown in a list of participants, but there is no way of identifying who pays what.
In addition, Spinnaker adheres to the Anti-Trust Safe Harbor guidelines ensuring anonymity in reporting.
Am I allowed to share the salary data of employees in my organisation?
In most countries, yes. There is nothing anti-competitive about sharing salary data anonymously. Members do not disclose directly to each other what they pay, and a condition of membership is that you use the salary data independently to keep your own company competitive and do not collude with other companies to fix salaries. If unsure, you should take independent legal advice in relation to countries relevant to you.
Do I have to disclose individual salaries? Can’t I just give a range?
The Maritime HR Association collects individual pay data in order to be able to provide accurate incumbent-weighted data and company-weighted data. This enables employers to use data in the most appropriate fashion for their current needs and the current economic and supply-and-demand climate.
You can find out more about Spinnaker’s salary reports and the Maritime HR Association on our website.
Shore-based Salary Reports – Spinnaker