Know how raises really happen
Most companies set salary budgets once a year, weeks or months before reviews are delivered. By the time your manager sits down to tell you the number, it has usually been decided. Raise the subject two to three months before the review cycle, while the budget can still move. Ordinary annual increases tend to run around 3 percent. A market adjustment or a promotion is a separate request, and those are the ones worth preparing for.
Find the market number
You need a defensible range for your title, your city and your years of experience. Draw on several sources: salary surveys and aggregator sites, pay ranges printed in current job postings, which a growing number of states require, recruiters who call you, and peers in your field. Federal labor law protects the right of most private-sector employees to discuss pay with one another, though supervisors are generally excluded. If three sources put your role between $68,000 and $80,000 and you earn $62,000, you have a case.
Build the one-page case
List four or five accomplishments since your last increase, each with a result: revenue brought in, costs cut, hours saved, projects delivered. Work that has grown beyond your job description is the strongest argument. Leave out your rent, your loans and your length of service, since none of those are the employer's reasons to pay more.
The conversation
- You ask for a dedicated meeting about your compensation.
- You open with your results and the scope you have taken on.
- You name a specific figure, usually 10 to 20 percent for a market correction, at the upper end of what your research supports.
- You stop talking and let the silence sit.
- You ask what the next steps and the timeline are, and you confirm them in an email afterward.
If the answer is no
Ask precisely what you would need to accomplish to earn the increase, and by when, then get that in writing and schedule the follow-up in three to six months. Ask whether anything else can move in the meantime: a one-time bonus, a title change, extra vacation or a training budget. Do not threaten to leave unless you hold an offer you would truly accept, because a bluff that is called ends badly. If the honest answer is that the money will never be there, the largest raises in most careers come from changing employers.
Tip Practice saying your number out loud until it sounds like a fact. People who mumble their figure negotiate against themselves.
