Salary and raise calculator

Triangulate. No single source is right on its own. Levels.fyi is strongest for tech and engineering, Payscale and Glassdoor are broader but noisier, and LinkedIn Salary skews toward larger employers. Recruiters who have approached you about comparable roles are often the most accurate source available, and asking them what a role pays costs you nothing.

Weight anything local. A national median is close to meaningless if you are in a market that pays well above or below it.

Where you can avoid it, avoid it. Anchoring the conversation to your current salary carries every past negotiation forward into this one. In much of the United States it’s now unlawful for an employer to ask — Ohio has no statewide ban, though several cities restrict it for public employers.

If you are asked directly, redirecting works more often than people expect: “I’m focusing on the range for this role — based on what I’ve seen for this scope, I’m targeting X.”

Often true, and worth taking seriously rather than as an insult. Internal increase budgets are usually capped as a percentage, which is precisely why the largest pay jumps in most careers happen when people change employers.

That doesn’t make the conversation pointless. It changes what you’re asking for. A commitment to a specific number at a specific date, a title change that resets the band, or a scope change that moves you into a different band are all real outcomes.

Then you have learned something concrete, which is more than most people get. The follow-up question is the valuable one: what specifically would need to be true for this to be a yes, and when could it be revisited.

A manager who can’t answer that has told you something important about your prospects there.

The arithmetic is the same; the leverage isn’t. In an interview you are being compared to a market and the employer has already decided they want you, which is the strongest position you’ll ever negotiate from. Internally you are being compared to a budget and a peer group.

The practical difference is that an external offer is negotiated once, quickly, while an internal raise is usually built over a quarter or two of visible groundwork.