How to benchmark salaries, from role to posted range in minutes
To benchmark a salary, pick the role, choose your market and seniority, and read the resulting band: P25, P50 and P75 base pay plus a posting-ready range. WageList does this in minutes, on public U.S. BLS wage data, with every adjustment documented below.
Run the exact method on the right, then read how each step works below.
- P25
- $0
- P50 ยท Median
- $0
- P75
- $0
Suggested posted range
Built from public U.S. BLS OES wage data (May 2025 release), adjusted for market, seniority, company stage and, when you pick one, industry, by the multipliers published in our methodology.
Get bands for your whole team
Get startedBenchmark a salary in three steps
Pick the role
Search the role list and select the job you are hiring or reviewing. Each role is mapped to the closest matching occupation in the U.S. BLS classification, so the base numbers describe the work itself, not a job-title guess. The dataset covers about 85 common roles across engineering, sales, marketing, ops, finance, design, support and HR.
Pick your market and seniority
Set three dials: market (US National, Tier-1 metro like SF, NY or Seattle, Tier-2 metro, or Remote US), seniority (Junior, Mid, Senior, Lead or Manager) and company stage (early startup, growth, established SMB). Each dial applies a fixed, published multiplier, so two people running the same inputs always get the same band. The market dial is the one most teams argue about: see how geographic pay differentials work for distributed teams.
Get your band and posted range
WageList returns the adjusted band: P25, P50 and P75 base salary in USD, drawn as a flat band bar. It also suggests a posted range (adjusted P25 to P75, each rounded to the nearest $1,000) with a copy-ready snippet you can paste straight into a job posting or an offer review, which is what salary range laws for job postings now require in a growing list of states.
Salary benchmarking methodology, published in full
Where the base numbers come from
Every band starts from public data: the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey, May 2025 release. For each role we take the national P25, P50 and P75 annual base salary of the closest matching occupation. No scraped job boards, no self-reported guesses, no black box. The same matching step done by hand is what compensation teams call market pricing a job.
How the multipliers adjust the band
Each percentile is adjusted with three fixed multipliers, applied as: adjusted = round(base × market × seniority × stage). The full table is below, and the implementation ships in the calculator source file resources/js/band-math.js, so the number on your screen and the method on this page can never drift apart.
The optional industry factor
Pick an industry and the band is multiplied by one more number: the BLS median for that occupation in that industry, divided by the BLS median for the same occupation across all industries, both from the May 2025 national estimates. Maintenance and repair workers earn a median of $61,500 in manufacturing against $49,590 across all industries, so their manufacturing factor is 1.240. Where BLS publishes no median for a role in an industry, the factor is 1.00 and the builder says so. Leave the industry on All industries and nothing changes. The factors ship in resources/js/industry-factors.json.
How the posted range is built
The suggested posted range runs from the adjusted P25 to the adjusted P75, each rounded to the nearest $1,000. That width is wide enough to be honest and narrow enough to be credible in a job posting, which is what pay-transparency rules expect. Read more about how bands are structured on our salary bands page.
Honest note: the demo runs on a dataset of about 85 roles derived from the public BLS data above. Saved bands in the workspace use the same data and the same multipliers, so the number you tried is the number you keep.
One band, end to end
Say you are hiring a Senior Software Engineer, Remote US, at a growth-stage company. WageList takes the national BLS percentiles for the matching occupation, multiplies each by 1.05 (Remote US) × 1.28 (Senior) × 1.02 (Growth), and returns the adjusted P25, P50 and P75. The posted range is the adjusted P25 to P75, rounded to the nearest $1,000. Every step is repeatable, so you can defend the number to a candidate, a board, or a regulator. Anything still unclear is probably answered in the salary benchmarking FAQ.