How Does Glassdoor's Rating Actually Work?

A company needs at least 5 reviews before Glassdoor will display an overall rating and a descriptive label (such as "Excellent" or "Good"); those label cutoffs were themselves set using data percentiles across the reviews Glassdoor has collected. The overall rating figure is rounded to the nearest 0.1 and refreshes on a roughly 7-business-day cycle as new reviews are approved.

Employees can also rate specific Workplace Factors — Career Opportunities, Compensation & Benefits, Culture & Values, Diversity & Inclusion, Senior Management, and Work/Life Balance — when they write a review. Those sub-ratings give candidates and employers a more granular read on culture and leadership, but Glassdoor does not publish them as a disclosed input formula for the single overall star rating shown on a company’s profile.

• Recency weighting — more recent employee reviews influence the overall rating more than older ones, so a stale review history behaves differently than an actively maintained one.
• A minimum-review threshold — no overall rating or label displays until a company has at least 5 approved reviews.
• Guideline compliance — reviews Glassdoor removes for violating its Community Guidelines (confidential info, harassment, incentivized/coerced content) don’t count toward the rating at all.
• A periodic refresh cycle — the displayed rating updates roughly every 7 business days as new approved reviews come in, rather than instantly with each submission.
• Workplace Factor sub-ratings (culture, senior management, compensation, career opportunities, work/life balance, diversity & inclusion) are collected per review and shown separately, giving candidates a fuller picture beyond the single overall number.