What Salary Should I Ask For? How to Figure Out Your Worth.

Photo-Illustration: by Stevie Remsberg

Get That Money  is an exploration of the many ways we think virtually our finances — what nosotros earn, what we accept, and what nosotros desire.

Whether you're negotiating your salary for a brand-new chore or asking for a raise at your current ane, the first dominion of negotiating is to know what y'all're worth. Only figuring that out can exist harder than it sounds. How, exactly, are y'all supposed to know what salary you should ask for? Here is a handy list.

At that place's a huge information imbalance when it comes to salary: Employers have the advantage of knowing the general range they're willing to pay and what their overall salary structures are. Every bit a candidate or even as an employee, you by and large don't have admission to that information and instead are stuck guessing and hoping that you don't wildly overshoot the right number (which volition brand you seem naïve or out of bear on) or undershoot it (where yous go out money on the tabular array that could have been yours).

Figuring out your market value tin can be so frustrating that some people throw upwards their hands and don't bother, instead leaving it up to the employer to name a number. That's not a great strategy, though, considering information technology puts y'all at the mercy of your employer. You tin can't assess an offer without understanding how in line with the market information technology is. Plus, if y'all're interviewing, a lot of employers insist on knowing what bacon range you're looking for (that'due south obnoxious since they should be upfront nearly what they're planning on paying, merely it'due south a common exercise) and will push back on vague answers that don't include an bodily dollar figure.

You lot'll be in a far stronger position if you lot go into conversations about salary with real knowledge about the marketplace rate for your work. But how exactly do yous effigy that out?

Online salary portals might seem like the most obvious way to figure out what you should be earning. The problem is that those sites (particularly the free ones) by and large don't business relationship in whatever accurate manner for the fact that job titles tin can stand for incredibly different scopes of responsibility and can vary wildly by field, company, size of the company, and the amount of feel y'all bring to the job. Many of them rely on self-reported data with no controls on how accurate or recent that information is. They can be an okay starting betoken, but in general they're only going to requite you a very rough range, and yous shouldn't use them as the concluding give-and-take on what salary yous want. (And yous definitely don't desire to cite these websites as your source to an employer! I've had candidates tell me, "Well, online salary calculators say this job should pay $X" when X is wildly off-base of operations for the particular configuration of the office. That ends up looking naïve.)

Instead, one of the almost useful ways to narrow down your truthful market value is to talk to people in your field.

A lot of u.s.a. still have a weird taboo around talking nearly our own salaries, so normally you tin't come out and ask, "Hey, how much do you lot make?" But yous can inquire questions like "How much would you expect a job like X at a company like Y to pay?" and "Does a salary of about $X sound right to yous for a job like this, or does that seem as well high or too low?" Most people have lots of opinions about salaries in their field and volition be happy to weigh in on questions similar that (and if you phrase your question that style, some people will end up volunteering their personal bacon info anyway).

If yous desire to bounce these sorts of questions off co-workers, y'all might worry nigh violating a written or unwritten rule confronting sharing bacon information with your colleagues. While lots of employers exercise indeed have "don't ask, don't tell" policies, the National Labor Relations Act actually makes information technology illegal for employers to prevent non-supervisory employees from discussing their pay with each other. (And yes, tons of employers attempt to prohibit it anyway. But that'southward illegal and you have the right to hash out bacon with your co-workers — although you lot even so might desire to do it discreetly, if you don't feel like battling your employer over it.)

You should also ask people with professional person-level knowledge nigh salaries: recruiters in your manufacture and professional organizations. Recruiters in your field generally won't accept the aforementioned discomfort with talking virtually salaries equally many other people practice, and are usually happy to talk about the going rate for the piece of work yous practice. They'll likewise often have insider cognition most who pays well and who doesn't. And professional associations like merchandise groups frequently do formal salary surveys, although yous might need to pay a membership fee to get admission to them.

Don't neglect chore ads! While most task listings won't include salary information, some do — then scouring ads in your field tin be an additional source of data.

You accept something else going for you: guidestar.org, which is a massive compendium of information about nonprofit organizations, including info on their finances and tax reporting. Y'all can look upward the salaries of an organization's key employees in that location, which can give you lot an idea of the organisation's pay scale. (Of course, continue in heed that a high-paid executive's bacon might not reveal anything near what junior staff earn … but if you see the organization's CEO is earning $50,000, you'll know your ain ceiling in that location is going to exist fairly low.)

As you exercise this research, go on in heed that you're looking for patterns. You're unlikely to come up out of this with a single figure ("I should be paid $83,000"). You're looking for a general range, and from there you tin can tweak it based on things like your feel and accomplishments. You should also cistron in other parts of the compensation a company is offering — things similar bonuses, unusually good or unusually bad vacation time, and the quality and price of the employer'southward health insurance.

If yous're reading all this thinking, "This would be a heck of a lot easier if companies were just transparent about how they pay," you're absolutely correct! And in fact, there's a move in some fields toward pay transparency, driven in part by the growing recognition of how opaqueness around salary disproportionately harms women and people of color. Simply we're at the early stages of it and most employers still play coy on salary. So doing your research and knowing your own marketplace value is a hugely of import tool in getting paid what you lot're worth.

What Salary Should I Ask For? How to Figure Out Your Worth.