Staffing agencies advertise ₱500 more for customer service than the companies themselves.

For customer service, yes: agencies post a median of ₱24,000 (774 ads) against ₱23,500 from companies hiring directly (911 ads). For some roles the gap flips.

Median advertised monthly pay. Roles with 10+ ads on both sides · scale ₱0–60K · August 2026.

Customer service ads that say no experience is needed (354 of them) cluster at ₱22,500, against ₱23,500 for all 1,704 customer service ads that state pay.

Customer service ads that name the account. Travel / airline accounts advertise the most; retail / e-commerce the least. Ads that name an account are a minority, so read these as signals.

Accounts with 10+ ads · scale ₱0–40K.

Ads that ask for Cantonese advertise a median ₱106,500 — 4.7× the ₱22,500 median across every Philippines-based ad that states pay. Six languages clear the threshold, and all six pay a multiple.

Pooled over the 12 months to November 2026, because a single month holds too few language ads to publish. Languages with 10+ ads in the window · scale ₱0–120K. An ad counts only when its title asks for the language — “Japanese Speaking”, “Spanish Bilingual”, “Japanese Java Developer”. A title that merely contains the word (a Japanese-owned plant, a Japanese restaurant) does not; until 21 September 2026 it did, which put the Japanese figure too low. Read this as the pay of the job, not the price of the language. An ad asking for Cantonese is usually a different job from an ad that asks for nothing — often an offshore or specialist desk. The gap is real; how much of it a course would earn you is not something these numbers can say.

In software engineer, the levels that state pay run from ₱27,750 to ₱120,000 — a 4.3× spread. 13 role families have two or more levels with 10+ ads each; the 8 widest are below.

These are not four rungs of one ladder. Employers use two different vocabularies: “senior” is what a specialist is called (most of these ads are accountants, engineers and developers), while “supervisor” and “lead” are what a floor or warehouse job is called. So a senior post can advertise more than a manager post without anyone having skipped a step — compare within a role, never across. “Mid” is left out: it clears the 10-ad rule but nearly every ad in it says “II” after the job title or the word “Intermediate”, which is a pay grade rather than what a reader means by mid-level. Levels are read from the ad title, and most ads state none · scale ₱0–120K · August 2026.