Salary benchmarking for small business owners who make the offers themselves
Salary benchmarking for small business means getting a defensible pay range for a role without a comp analyst, an HR team, or a five-figure survey subscription. Wagelist builds one from public wage data in minutes, priced for companies under 200 people.
Build a band for the role you are hiring on the right, then see how owners without an HR team use it to make a fast, defensible offer.
- P25
- $0
- P50 · Median
- $0
- P75
- $0
Suggested posted range
Sample benchmarks derived from public wage data (U.S. BLS OES, May 2024). Early-access customers get live, methodology-documented benchmarks.
Get bands for your whole team
No HR team, and the offer is due Friday
In most small companies the owner or general manager sets pay personally. The usual method is a quick scan of job boards, which produces numbers that are self-reported, skewed toward big metros and big companies, and different on every site you check. Guess high and you carry the cost for years across every raise. Guess low and the good candidate takes the other offer, the ad runs for another six weeks, and the work piles up on you.
The traditional fix, a compensation survey at $5,000 to $30,000, was never built for a company that hires four people a year. If you want the manual version first, our guide to how much to pay employees walks the free BLS data step by step. What a small business needs is the same primitive big companies use, the market-anchored salary band, at a price and effort level that matches four hires a year.
Three small-business offers, answered
01 · Office manager
Your first operations hire, and everyone you interview names a different number. The band answers: what an office manager earns in a Tier-2 metro, and what range to put in the ad.
Band: $52,800 / $68,750 / $86,900
02 · Bookkeeper
Your accountant is drowning and you need day-to-day books handled. The band answers: the realistic national base for a bookkeeper, so you neither insult candidates nor pay accountant rates for bookkeeping.
Band: $39,000 / $47,500 / $58,000
03 · Technical support engineer
Your product needs real support, not a call script. The band answers: where support engineer pay sits between customer service and software engineering, a gap job boards are worst at.
Band: $52,000 / $68,000 / $88,000
Figures are P25 / P50 / P75 base salary from the Wagelist sample dataset, derived from public U.S. BLS wage statistics with documented market multipliers.
The office manager offer, worked through
Office managers benchmark at $48,000 / $62,500 / $79,000 US-national base. Your company is an established small business in a Tier-2 metro, so the documented 1.10 market multiplier applies:
Offer at P50 for a solid hire, above it for someone who will also run payroll and vendors. If your state requires a range in the posting, and as of 2026 many do, the rounded P25 to P75 range is ready to paste. Details by state are in our guide to salary ranges in job postings.
What you can do today
Today, the free pay band calculator covers around 60 common roles across operations, finance, sales, support and admin, no signup needed. At launch, early-access members get saved bands for every role in the company, posting-ready ranges, and live benchmarks with the methodology documented. Planned pricing starts at $99 per month, which is the point of Wagelist as salary benchmarking software: the enterprise tools were priced for someone else.
Hiring for a venture-backed team instead? See startup salary benchmarks. Running a mission-driven organization? See nonprofit salary benchmarking.
Early access
Stop guessing from job boards
Wagelist is in early access. Request your spot and we will email you when it opens.