How Much Do Severance’s Macrodata Refiners Get Paid?

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There may be no show more fun and frustrating to talk about than Severance. When is Mark going to start really remembering things? Where is Gemma/Ms. Casey? What’s up with the goats? Thrillingly — or perhaps still frustratingly — attempting to answer these questions only rewards you with more complex, philosophical questions: Are our identities intrinsically connected to our memories; are corporations just better-run cults; what justifies the suffering of another person; can a soul be split in two? While it makes sense that a TV series about employees at a mysterious biotechnology corporation who lose all their work-related memories at the end of the day would inspire so many big, existential questions, the question I can’t stop asking about Severance is a small, practical one: How much do the Innies make?

Well, not the Innies, exactly, since they are paid in erasers and waffles, but how much do their Outies get compensated for subjecting innocent versions of themselves to quasi-religious corporate torture? More importantly, how much would I do it for? The answers to these questions have been elusive, troubling, and, frankly, all I can think about while watching the latest episode. How am I supposed to pay attention to the weird Helly-Mark-Helena love triangle when I’m wondering whether Dylan can afford a Tesla Truck when he promises his wife he’ll “test-drive only”? When Milchick offered Mark a 20 percent pay bump to return to MDR, the only thing I could focus on for the rest of the episode was trying to figure out what the base salary was. I’ve alienated my co-workers, friends, fiancé, and strangers at the coffee shop, asking them what they think a Lumon refiner’s salary is and pressing them when they try to change the subject or claim not to watch the show. The answers have ranged from less than a bartender to more than the average CEO; the evidence varied from the type of work they do, their shabby dwellings, the retro-futuristic tech of their daily lives, and Dylan’s wife, Gretchen, having to work nights.

Admit it: You’re now wondering if they make more than you. It’s okay. They probably don’t … but maybe they do? Which is worse? I’d feel awful if I found out I was paid more to blog about my weird TV obsessions than they were to trap a piece of their consciousness inside a purgatory out of Jean-Paul Sartre’s nightmares. And if they made way, way more? Would that justify … whatever it is they do? It’s a disturbing moral dilemma and nearly impossible to stop worrying about unless you’re comfortable with your salary or a boomer is subsidizing your existence. (Must be nice.) Speaking for the rest of us, I won’t know peace until I investigate.

The clear starting point is finding the closest real-life equivalent to a macrodata refiner. So, what is macrodata refinement? In the second episode of the series, “Half Loop,” Mark trains Helly to refine data, one encrypted file at a time, with the data showing up as seemingly random numbers on a screen. The refiners search for groups of numbers that elicit emotions that correspond to Kier’s four “Tempers” and categorize them accordingly. Mark describes the work as “mysterious and important.” Like my former manager at the tech start-up I worked at, Mark is just repeating made-up bullshit and being completely unhelpful. Fortunately, Helly stumbles onto the best job description when she asks, “My job is to scroll through this spreadsheet and look for numbers that are scary?” Categorize scary numbers all day? Sounds like data entry to me.

All manner of businesses practice data entry, so these roles are scattered throughout finance, technology, health care, retail, education, and any industry you can think of. (Monster Energy was recently hiring for a data-entry clerk.) Corporations and governments, and thus, the world, run on data. Any data, really, but the more private, the better. Names, addresses, emails, phone numbers, credit scores, online searches and behavior — you name it, a company is underpaying someone to feed it to a machine. While in real life, it matters enormously what information gets stored, sold, and manipulated, for our petty purposes, what the numbers represent in Severance is none of our business; all we care about is the act of moving data from one place to another, which is the main job description of both data-entry clerks and macrodata refiners.

Next, we want to figure out where their work takes place. By all indications, it is somewhere cold and remote. When Innie Irv finds Outie Irv’s hidden information on Lumon during the Overtime Contingency, we see an address among the names of severed employees: 346 Stout Rd. Kier, PE 07450. There is no state abbreviation for PE, but 07450 is a zip code in New Jersey. Bell Labs, the research facility that Severance uses as a stand-in for Lumon HQ, is also in New Jersey, but, as my colleague and Jersey resident Kathryn VanArendonk has informed me, New Jersey doesn’t get enough snow to match what their winters look like, which makes upstate New York the next logical choice. There are areas that are cold and remote enough, and if Lumon is a major corporation, it stands to reason that one of its headquarters would be close to New York City.

Putting these two data points together, we can find the average salary for a data-entry clerk in New York, which is $44,313. I looked for something that sounded comparable to Lumon’s macrodata refiners and found a job listing for an administrative data-entry associate for the Cardiovascular Research Foundation based in New York City. Here’s an example of one of the role’s responsibilities: “When performing V1, enter all data from CRF files into the designated EDC, then digitally sign with V1 stamp.” Sounds mysterious and important (i.e., scary) to me. We have our job title, location, and average salary figured out.

But let’s not forget that this role requires agreeing to experimental brain surgery. I couldn’t find any job listings that required medical surgeries or examinations because, apparently, it’s illegal (for now) and generally frowned upon. Taking a step back and looking at the prerequisite more holistically, the nature of severance for the refiners is to keep the top-secret nature of their work so secretive even they can’t know what it is they do. There are job-related compensations tied to security clearances for roles that deal with sensitive information, restricted areas, or both, which is the case for the MDR department on the severed floor. Jobs that require a top-secret security clearance range from engineers for rocket companies owned by “gamers” to investigators for the U.S. Secret Service. Getting a top-secret security clearance is a long, arduous process that requires employer sponsorship and a thorough background investigation that can take up to a year. Getting the severance operation seems less invasive and time-intensive by comparison — Helena Eagan got the surgery the same morning she started as a refiner — but in lieu of controversial-medical-experiment salary data, let’s use top-secret security-clearance positions as a substitute. The average salary for a position that requires a top-secret security clearance is $146,758 in New York, but since data-entry clerks are considered entry level, let’s narrow it down to the average for salaries in the 25th percentile, which is $125,800.

There you have it. By my demented yet unimpeachable estimations, the average salary for a macrodata refiner is $125,800. What do we do now that we have the number? If this exercise has shown me anything, it’s that talking about pay is deeply uncomfortable, but in a time of discriminatory pay gaps and increasing wealth inequality, wage transparency becomes more important than ever. So, I ask: Does that compensation feel right?

Before you answer, let’s refine a bit more data: By the end of 2024, the median weekly earnings for full-time and salaried workers was $1,192, which adds up to $61,984 a year. By contrast, the average hourly wage for a CEO in New York is $75.05, or $156,100 annually. Then consider that the Outies are the CEOs of their bodies and minds: They do none of the work and have no idea how the business really operates, but they make all of the decisions and cash the checks. Now that we know how much the refiners make, the amount of money seems beside the point. No amount is truly enough for the Innies, the real laborers who actually sacrifice; for the Outies, any amount is too much. Suddenly, my small, practical question is starting to feel frustratingly existential after all.