Build pay grades with minimum, midpoint and maximum salaries — and see the spread.
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Design salary bands and grade structures with calculated progression between levels
A pay structure is a system used by organizations to determine and administer employee compensation, based on factors such as job responsibilities, skills, performance, and market conditions.
Pay structures typically consist of salary grades with defined minimum, midpoint, and maximum values. The progression between grades determines how salaries increase as employees move up the organization hierarchy.
This determines the spread from min to max (e.g., 40% means ±20% from midpoint)
Percent increase from one grade to the next
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One per grade level, anchored to market survey data or your comp strategy.
How wide each band should be — e.g. 50% spread means min sits at 80% of mid and max at 120%.
Min, midpoint, and max for every grade, ready to drop into your HRIS or comp policy doc.
Build out your entire grade ladder in one view. Add or remove grades on the fly without losing your inputs.
Pick a single spread for the whole structure or vary it by grade level — wider at senior, narrower at entry, the way modern structures actually work.
Skip the spreadsheet. Enter the inputs and get every band's bounds without typing formulas or wiring up cells.
Comp leaders use this calculator to draft new structures, sanity-check existing ones, and bring proposals to leadership without a finance background.
“We re-designed our entire engineering ladder with this in an afternoon. Took the output to our CFO and got sign-off the same week.”
Patricia O.
Head of People, Nairobi, Kenya
“Used this to validate that the grade structure our consultants delivered actually held up. Caught two grades where the spread overlapped neighbouring grades by more than half.”
Joon-ho K.
Comp Analyst, Seoul, South Korea
“Honestly the only reason I can talk pay structure to leadership without freezing — the math is in front of me.”
Beatrice L.
HR Manager, Bristol, UK
Pay structures turn one-off decisions into rules. They make internal equity defensible — when an employee asks why they earn what they do, you can point to a grade, a market position, and a set of bands rather than a series of judgment calls. They prevent the “negotiation tax” that quietly accumulates over time as good negotiators accrue pay advantages over equally capable colleagues who didn’t push as hard. And they speed up every hiring decision, because the offer band is already settled before the conversation starts.
Each grade has three reference points: minimum, midpoint, and maximum.
The midpoint is the load-bearing number — it’s set against the market and the other two are derived from it via the range spread.
Spread is the percentage difference between minimum and maximum, expressed relative to midpoint. 30% spread is narrow — common at entry levels where there’s little variance in what proficiency looks like. 50% spread is the workhorse for most professional roles. 70%+ spread is wide and typical at executive levels where individual market value varies dramatically. The trade-off: narrow bands give you tight pay control but force more frequent grade changes; wide bands give you flexibility but make compa-ratio less informative.
Most structures step midpoints by 10–15% per grade. Less than that and the promotion delivers no meaningful raise (employees notice). More than that and you create gaps too wide for high-performers to bridge in a single grade move, slowing internal mobility. Break the pattern only when you have a real reason — a structural skill leap (IC to manager, mid to senior in a tech ladder), a market discontinuity, or an executive band where market practice diverges.
Healthy structures have 25–50% overlap between adjacent grades. Overlap means a fully proficient employee at grade N can earn more than a brand-new hire at grade N+1, which sounds wrong but is correct — proficiency at the lower grade should beat being paid for capabilities you haven’t demonstrated yet at the higher one. Excessive overlap (above 50%) starts to make the grade boundaries meaningless; insufficient overlap (under 20%) creates promotion cliffs that slow internal mobility. Use this calculator to visualise overlap before you commit to a structure.
A structure is a living artifact, not a one-time design. Refresh the midpoints against fresh market data every year (most comp surveys publish annually). Audit grade drift every 3–5 years — roles evolve, and a band that was right in 2022 may be misaligned by 2026. Pair maintenance with downstream checks: compa-ratio tells you whether individuals are paid fairly against the structure, range penetration tells you where they sit inside their bands, and pay compression catches the cases where the structure has stopped doing its job. The calculator above gives you the upstream design; the other three keep it honest over time.