How to check if you are being underpaid, step by step

Most people who suspect they are underpaid are working from a feeling. A colleague let slip a number at a leaving drinks. A job ad for something that looks like your role listed a range that started above your salary. A friend in another city seems to be doing better on what sounds like the same work. Feelings like these are often right, but they are a bad basis for a conversation with your manager and a worse basis for quitting.

The fix is to turn the feeling into a number you can defend. That takes an afternoon, not a week, and the method is the same whether you are a payroll clerk, a site engineer or a marketing lead. This guide covers where salary data comes from and how much to trust it, how to adjust for location and experience, how to read the signals your own employer gives off, and what to do with the answer, including the case where you are paid about right.

Start with the job, not the title

Titles are close to meaningless for benchmarking. A “manager” at one company runs a team of twelve; at another the title is a courtesy given to someone with no reports. “Analyst” covers everything from data entry to building financial models that decide whether a factory gets built.

Before you look up a single number, write down what you actually do in four or five lines. Include the size of what you are responsible for (budget, headcount, client accounts, number of sites), the tools or qualifications the job needs, and who you report to. Then find the two or three titles the wider market uses for that combination. If you search for your own title and the postings that come up describe a different job, you are benchmarking the wrong thing.

The sources, ranked by how much to trust them

No single source is reliable on its own. The approach that works is to gather three or four and look for where they overlap.

Government wage statistics. In the US, the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes occupational employment and wage estimates by occupation and metro area, with percentile breakdowns. In the UK, the Office for National Statistics publishes the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, which gives median pay by occupation and region. Statistics Canada and the Australian Bureau of Statistics publish equivalents. These are the most trustworthy numbers you will find, because they come from employer payroll data rather than self-reporting. Their weakness is that they lag by a year or more, and the occupational categories are broad. Use them as a floor and a sanity check, not a final answer.

Job postings with published ranges. Since pay transparency laws spread across US states such as Colorado, California, New York and Washington, and since the EU directive started pushing employers toward disclosure, a large share of postings now carry a salary range. This is the most current data available and it reflects what employers are willing to pay to hire, which is usually higher than what they pay people already in the seat. Read twenty postings for your role in your region and note the bottom, middle and top of each range. Ignore ranges so wide they are meaningless (a posting offering “60,000 to 180,000” is telling you nothing). We cover how to read and use these ranges in more detail at /news/pay-transparency-laws-explained-and-how-to-use-them/.

Crowdsourced salary sites. Glassdoor, Payscale, Levels.fyi and similar sites are self-reported. They skew toward people who are motivated to report (often those who are pleased with their pay or annoyed about it), toward larger employers, and toward tech and professional roles, where the samples are big enough to be useful. For a maintenance technician in a mid-sized town, the same sites might have eight data points, three of them from 2019. Treat crowdsourced figures as one input, and weight them by how many entries sit behind the number.

Recruiters and staffing agencies. A recruiter who places people in your field sees real offers every week. Most will tell you the going rate for a fifteen-minute call, because it costs them nothing and you might become a placement. Ask a specific question: “What are you seeing for someone with five years in this role in this city?” Agency recruiters have an incentive to say the market is hot, so discount slightly.

Union pay scales and public sector bands. If a union covers your occupation anywhere nearby, its published scale is hard evidence of what the work is worth, even if you are not a member. Public sector job postings almost always publish bands, which tell you something about the private sector floor.

Adjusting for location

Pay for the same job varies enormously by place, and most people adjust in the wrong direction. The instinct is to compare your salary to the highest number you can find, which is usually from a big expensive city. That is not a benchmark, it is a wish.

The right comparison is to your own labor market: the area where you could realistically take another job without moving. For most people that is a metro area or a commuting radius. On job postings, check where the job is actually based, not where the company is headquartered.

Remote work complicates this. Some employers pay a single national rate for remote roles; others adjust by the employee’s location, sometimes with published tiers. If you are remote and your employer pays a location-adjusted rate, you are competing with everyone in your tier, not everyone in the country. If you are remote and could apply to companies that pay a flat national rate, your benchmark just moved up, and that is a legitimate point to raise.

Adjusting for experience and scope

Salary data usually gives a median and sometimes percentiles. Where you sit in that range depends mostly on three things.

Years doing this specific job, not years working. Ten years in a warehouse followed by one year as a logistics coordinator makes you a second-year coordinator for pay purposes, however unfair that feels.

Scope. Managing four people is different from managing forty. Handling a client book worth a certain amount is different from handling one ten times larger. If your scope is well above what the typical posting describes, you belong in the upper part of the range.

Scarce skills or credentials. A specific certification, a second language the employer needs, or experience with a system the company is migrating to can push you up a band on its own.

Be honest with yourself here. Three years in the role with standard scope puts you near the middle of the range, not the top. Being at the 20th percentile with eight years and expanded scope is a real problem.

Reading the clues inside your own company

Your employer leaks information about its pay structure constantly. Most people never think to collect it.

Job postings for your own team. If your company advertises a role at your level and the range starts above your salary, you have the single most powerful piece of evidence there is. New hires being paid more than existing staff for the same work is common (it even has a name, pay compression), and it is the thing managers find hardest to defend.

Pay bands, if they exist. Larger employers usually have formal bands or grades, even if they do not publish them. HR may tell you your band and where you sit in it if you ask directly. Some jurisdictions require employers to disclose a range on request. Knowing you are at the bottom of a band you have been in for four years is useful.

What people are hired at. In most countries it is legal for colleagues to discuss pay with each other, and in the US the National Labor Relations Act protects most private-sector employees’ right to do so. Employers may discourage it; they generally cannot prohibit it. A couple of honest conversations with peers you trust, framed as “I am trying to work out whether I am in the right band, would you be willing to compare notes,” is normal adult behavior.

Raise history. If your raises have tracked inflation or come in below it for several years while the market rate has risen, you have drifted down the range without anyone deciding to underpay you. This is the most common way people end up underpaid: through neglect, not decision.

A simple worksheet

Fill this in before you decide anything.

Item	Your entry
Role as the market describes it (two or three titles)
Your local labor market (metro or region)
Government median for this occupation in this region
Range across 15 to 20 recent postings (low, mid, high)
Crowdsourced median, with number of entries
Recruiter or professional body figure, if obtained
Your realistic percentile given experience and scope
Your benchmark figure (where the sources overlap at that percentile)
Your current base salary
Gap as a percentage
Internal evidence (posting ranges, band position, peer figures)

A gap of under about five percent is within the noise of the data and not worth a difficult conversation on its own. Five to fifteen percent is a solid case for a raise request. Above fifteen percent, the market is telling you something your employer is unlikely to fix in a single adjustment, and you should be thinking about your options as well as your case.

Remember to compare total compensation, not just base. A lower salary with a strong pension match, a bonus that actually pays out and generous leave can beat a higher headline number.

What to do with the answer

If the gap is small or nonexistent. This is more common than people expect, and it is genuinely useful to know. You can stop wondering, and your next raise conversation can be about performance and scope rather than catch-up. If you still want more money, the route is more responsibility or a move, not a benchmarking argument.

If the gap is moderate. Ask for a raise, with the evidence in hand. Lead with your contribution, then bring the market data in as support rather than as a threat. Managers respond badly to “Glassdoor says I should earn more” and well to “I have taken on X and Y this year, and the market rate for this scope in this city is around Z; I would like us to close that gap.” The full script, timing around budget cycles, and what to do if the answer is no are at /pay/how-to-ask-for-a-raise/.

If the gap is large. You can still ask, and sometimes the company would rather adjust than recruit. But many employers will not move someone twenty percent in one step, and a half-fix leaves you still underpaid and now visibly unhappy. Start applying in parallel. An actual offer is the only benchmark nobody can argue with, and the negotiation techniques at /pay/how-to-negotiate-salary-for-a-new-job/ apply from the moment you get one.

If the evidence points to unequal pay for equal work. Being paid less than a colleague of a different sex or race for substantially the same work is potentially a legal matter, not a benchmarking one. Equal pay law exists in the US, UK, Canada and Australia. Document what you know and get advice (an employment lawyer, or ACAS in the UK) before raising it internally.

One thing to do this week

Pull up fifteen postings for your role in your area and write down the ranges. Just look at the numbers next to your own salary. Half the people who do this exercise find out they are roughly fine and can stop worrying. The other half get the one thing a pay conversation needs most, which is a number they did not make up.