Survey: Salary Structures

The Compensation Tool has features that help your organization manage your salary structure and salary grades, including: overall grade alignment analysis and charts, reporting tools that allow you to compare your employee’s salaries to the midpoint the market value of their role, as well as summary reports that show your employees’ salary distribution within the job’s salary range.

Does your organization use salary structures?

The significant number of participants of this survey have salary structures in place.

• Nearly 90% of organizations that participate in this survey utilize salary structures.

• 10.8% of organizations do not have salary structures currently in place.

What type of salary structure is currently in place?  

More than 90% of survey participants use either traditional or market based salary structures.

• Approximately 1/3 of participants use traditional salary ranges which typically have range spreads of 20% - 40% and midpoint progressions of 5% - 10% 

• Nearly 2/3 of participants use market-based ranges which typically have range spreads of 30% - 80% and midpoint progressions of 10% - 15%
• In this survey, the remaining participants utilize either Broadband or Step Structures.

How many different salary structures does your organization use? (Please exclude structures for retail jobs if different rates are in place for each location).

More than half of the participants have fewer than 4 salary structures, and more than one-fifth have more than 10 salary structures.

• 21.8% of participants have a single salary structure
• 43.63% of participants have 2-4 salary structures 
• Only 12.7% of participants have between 5 and 10 salary structures
• 21.8% or participants have more than 10 salary structures in place.

What is your midpoint progression?

More than half of participants use a midpoint progression between 10% and 15%.

• More than half (51.2%) of participant’s salary structures have a midpoint progression between 10% and 15%

• Roughly 17% of participant’s structures have midpoint progressions between 5% and 9.99%
• Approximately one-quarter (24.9%) of participant’s structures have midpoint progressions between 15% and 19.99%
• Fewer than 7.5% of participants have midpoint progressions that are either less than 5% or greater than 20%

How frequently are the salary structures updated?

More than half of organizations that participated in this survey update their salary structures annually.

• 53.7% or participants update their salary structures on an annual basis
• Approximately one-forth (24.4%) of participants update their salary structures every other year.
• Less than 10% of participants update their salary structures every third year.
• 12.2% or participants update their structure onlyas needed