These 10 Salary Calculators Make it Crazy Easy to Negotiate Your Pay
Because equal pay is such an important issue for women in the workplace, we’ve always crowdsourced salary data and information from women in our community to help others understand what the average salary is for a given title and department at various employers.
However, sometimes you may be interested in exploring careers where a job title is unique, or you’re just trying to figure out whether your income would be positively impacted if you went elsewhere in the industry (and not to any particular, specific company).
That’s where salary calculators can come in handy. These tools can help you determine what you should be earning based on yoru title, location, experience, and other factors. Want to try one out for yourself? Here are some of our favorites.
10 Salary Calculators
1. Payscale
We partnered with Payscale by embedding their basic salary calculator on our site. If you haven’t heard of Payscale before, they produce compensation benchmarking software sold to employers who want to understand how much they should pay for their employee positions.
If you provide the city and state in which you work, along with your job title, Payscale’s salary calculator will give you the median salary level for that title in your location.
You can delve even more deeply into your peers’ rate of compensation if you share additional information with them, such as your years of experience in the role, and whether you earn money on an annual, hourly, full-time or part-time basis. You can even find out about things like tips, overtime pay, or commission benchmarking information.
If you fill out a detailed salary report, you will be asked to provide things ranging beyond income, including the type of employer you manage, whether you manage other people, and at what levels those direct reports work (e.g. whether they are middle-management versus entry-level employees). Your industry and employer size (and revenues) matter, too.
Beyond pay, Payscale’s data accounts for the financial value of your benefits, which includes weeks of vacation (unless you receive unlimited vacation), healthcare and retirement benefits. Your gender, age, race, and educational levels are also factored into your salary computation.
2. Salary.com
Similar to Payscale, Salary.com has a calculator that begins by simply asking you your job title and location (city and state). Once you get beyond this point, you can see in visual format what the distribution of salaries is for your entered job title and location. You can see the median salary, as well as what the bottom 25% and top 75% paycheck earners with your same job title make where you work.
Finally, they also break down a pie chart of what bonus amounts and benefits are given to people with your job title and location and the value of those benefits by type. Moreover, you can see whether changing industries or having more years of experience or people with different levels of educational attainment have better (or worse) salary levels.
3. Glassdoor
Glassdoor is best known for collecting survey data from its users about how much they make. Visitors to their site can look at salary data by company and job title or location, and it’s a useful tool for those interested in searching an hourly salary, too. They also have a salary calculator tool in beta called “Know Your Worth” which gives you a salary estimate based on job market dynamics.
Unlike the rest of their crowdsourced data, Glassdoor’s Know Your Worth tool does not get published on their site unless you choose to give them this right. Moreover, you are asked your salary information up front — unlike the other salary calculators on this list.
As of this writing, the tool did not have salary information for certain job titles that are more unique (e.g. “Head of Product” versus “Product Manager”). Presumably, this is because this tool is still in beta. However, the format and interface of the site were intuitive and easy to use and navigate.
4. Monster
The job site Monster also offers a salary calculator, which they call a “Salary Wizard.” You can receive a personalized salary report that they say will help you negotiate for more pay. However, first, you must fill out information, starting like the other calculators do, with your location and job title.
Once you get beyond this point, you’re asked a set of by-now familiar-looking questions, such as your industry, your employer size, years of experience, gender, and educational levels attained.
Some new questions compared to the other salary calculators include whether you have obtained a degree at a prestigious college and whether you believe your education and degree are relevant to your career.
Ultimately, to receive your personalized salary report, you need to pay between $30-$80 for it and create an account with Monster.
5. Hired
Hired is a fairly new company that helps passive job applicants in the tech industry be recruited by employers who must name their price for a role when they reach out to candidates. The company takes a percentage of a new hire’s first-year salary, which incentivizes them to match employer and candidate well.
Hired’s salary calculator dataset is confined to jobs in the following categories: sales, software engineering, data science, product management and design. This reflects the fact that Hired’s passive candidate matching model tends to be in the high-growth, high-demand technology industry where these jobs are most in demand. For example, according to one report, the average salary offered on the platform is $128,000.
Moreover, the number of cities Hired seems to capture data within tend to be large technology hubs, like the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Boston, Austin, etc. Some global locations, like London and Sydney, are also included, but the total geographical reach of Hired’s salary data is more limited than the other calculators we looked at.
Moreover, Hired’s salary data reports the 50th, 70th and 90th percentile salaries for a given job title and type within one of these cities. Their numbers for salary were on the higher side of what we saw among all the calculators. Again, this may be due to the source of their data and the types of in-demand candidates on their platform.
One differentiator that makes Hired stand out, despite its limited data and focus on technology hiring, is that they report their data based on real interview information that is proffered by employers via their platform (as opposed to crowdsourced data or survey information of the type that presumably power Glassdoor, Payscale, and Monster’s salary calculators).
6. Salary Expert
Salary Expert not only allows you to search for your expected earnings in the United States but also includes information about your title and industry overseas. If you're looking to make a big move, this could be the calculator for you.
Not only does the salary calculator take into account your industry, role, and location, but it also looks at other factors, such as your highest degree obtained and from where you earned it, your current employer, relevant skills, and current salary.
In addition to projecting your salary, the calculator compares it to national averages. It also provides additional education data relevant to your position.
7. My Career Path
Powered by CareerBuilder, My Career Path shows you the local and national salary averages of someone in your career based on your highest degree earned.
The tool also shows you the relevant skills recruiters want to see on the resume of someone in your position to help you better market yourself as a job seeker. Additionally, it displays relevant job titles and their average salaries.
8. Education to Career
Boasting information for over 900 jobs, ETC specializes in FinTech occupations.
The tool asks you to specify your state, region, occupation, years of experience in the field, and the highest level of occupation attained (or those of the location or industry you're pursuing). If you did attend college, you'll be asked to input the name of that school.
In addition to the median salary for your occupation, the tool will display entry-level salaries for the field, the salary for top earners, and your project potential salary based on the information you input. You'll also learn how many people have the title of your job or the job you're seeking in location.
9. Dice
Dice is a job search tool that specializes in tech positions. However, it does include other occupations, particularly those needed at tech companies even if they don't directly involve tech skills.
Using Dice's "How Much Are Your Skills Worth?" tool helps you understand your market value. You'll input your title, location, and years of experience to see your "salary prediction," a range estimate. The tool will also display skills related to your profession and by what percentage you can expect your salary to increase if you have them. In fact, you can even click on the skill to add it to your skills set, and Dice will recalculate your salary estimate accordingly.
The tool includes several skills that someone in the position is expected to include, so you can also delete skills and see the tool adjust your salary as well.
In order to fully utilize the salary calculator, you'll need to create an account, but it's free to do so.
10. Indeed
While Indeed's salary estimator is less personal than many others—you're really only searching for the job title or the company name, rather than any specific information about yourself—the website has an extensive collection of data, boasting over 500 million data points.
Since you'll only see a national average for a position, the best purpose for the tool is finding out what you can expect to earn on average if you're thinking of changing careers or newly entering a career field.
What are the benefits of using a salary calculator?
A salary calculator can help you find out what you should be making in a given industry, at a certain company, and in a certain position. Many breakdown salaries by years of experience, geographic location and past experiences in the workplace. They are a great tool for answering questions like:
- How much should I be paid?
- What is an appropriate salary to ask for?
- Can you negotiate an entry-level salary?
- When should you enter a counter offer?
These questions and more can be answered by using a salary calculator.
Almost all of these salary calculators are free to use (though most require you to sign up and to provide further information before you can get full access to all their data).
When we conducted a side-by-side comparison, the actual end-result salary information for the job title “product manager,” as an example, was similar on all the sites. What did vary dramatically was the presentation and ease of use of the data; we discuss these points in the list above.
In the end, while we certainly had our favorites, we recommend taking a look at all the salary calculators here to triage the numbers that best work for you. After all, compensation is an art as much as a science. And if you’re looking for data to help you with a higher salary negotiation, you’ll want to be armed with the highest number possible to bring home the prettiest paycheck!
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