Eight markets. Eight different public records.
How much of a research brief can be answered from the public record, and how much has to be established by primary research, differs enormously between these markets. That difference is what the fee is, and it is the single thing most research quotes fail to explain.
Where we work, and what changes in each one
Open a market for what is researchable there, how it is bought and what it costs.
United Kingdom
London · Manchester · Birmingham · Leeds · Edinburgh
An open but lagged public record; the work is verification rather than discovery.
United States
New York · Bay Area · Chicago · Austin · Boston
Outstanding federal statistics, thin private-company disclosure, thirty separate metro markets.
United Arab Emirates
Dubai · Abu Dhabi · Sharjah · DIFC · ADGM
A thin public record; almost everything comes from multilingual primary research.
Germany
Munich · Berlin · Frankfurt · Hamburg · Stuttgart
The Mittelstand holds the market and is barely in any database; phone-led, German-language research.
Netherlands
Amsterdam · Rotterdam · Utrecht · Eindhoven
Excellent coverage, so stale data is the main risk — and headcount is not capacity.
Belgium
Brussels · Antwerp · Ghent · Leuven · Liège
Three language markets means genuinely three pieces of research.
Austria
Vienna · Graz · Linz · Salzburg · Innsbruck
Small enough to enumerate rather than sample, and small enough that discretion is a method question.
Australia
Sydney · Melbourne · Brisbane · Perth · Adelaide
Strong public statistics, five separate capital markets, and research worked while your office is closed.
Four things that break a cross-border programme
These are the errors we see most often when a process designed for one market is applied to another.
The public record is excellent in some of these markets and almost absent in others
Companies House in the UK, the Bundesanzeiger in Germany, KVK in the Netherlands and ASIC in Australia give usable corporate frames. BLS and Census data give the US the strongest statistical frame anywhere. The UAE gives you very little, so almost everything is primary research — which is exactly why commissioned research adds most value there.
Professional-network coverage is not uniform
UK, Dutch and Australian eastern-capital populations are well covered and the work is verification. German Mittelstand engineers, Austrian industrial populations and Gulf operational staff are not, and reaching them is phone research in the local language. Research priced per name without reference to this is priced wrong.
Pay is researchable at population level and almost never at individual level
The exception is listed-company executive pay in the US and the UK, which is disclosed. Everywhere else, individual compensation is reconstructed from evidenced offers, posted ranges, collective agreement positions and published scales — and any supplier claiming to hold verified individual salaries should be asked how.
What may lawfully be recorded differs by jurisdiction
GDPR across Europe, UK GDPR with the ICO, the federal PDPL plus separate DIFC and ADGM regimes in the UAE, the Privacy Act in Australia and a patchwork of state laws in the US. We research to the standard of the market being studied and document which applied.
Before you commission across borders
Talent research services
What research capacity covers, how it is bought and what it costs.
What is talent research?
Definition, the layers, and how it differs from mapping and intelligence.
What it costs
2026 fee bands in four currencies and the drivers behind them.
Research firms compared
Audentia against four named alternatives, sourced and dated.
Our research methodology
Source hierarchy, verification standard and confidence grading.
The resource library
Every guide, market page and answer in one place.
Researching across more than one market?
Tell us the populations and the countries. We will say what is researchable in each, how much is primary research, and what it costs — in writing, before you commit.
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