Salary and benefits benchmarking

Salary and compensation benchmarking is the process of comparing your organisation’s pay structure with industry standards to ensure your business is competitive, equitable, and aligned with the market.

It involves analysing salary data for specific skills, roles, levels, and industries to pinpoint trends and gaps in pay and benefits.

There are significant advantages to using salary and employee benefits benchmarking. It can help you attract top talent by ensuring your offers are competitive and improve budget allocation by helping you avoid overpaying for roles. Because salary benchmarking is backed by evidence, it can also strengthen your reputation as a fair employer.

Each benchmarking report provides a clear summary and detailed analysis of your organisation’s pay structures compared to market standards. Every report is tailored to your specific brief and typically includes market salary and benefits data; skills and position comparisons; competitor data; and insights segmented by industry, region, and company size to ensure relevance to your business.

Importantly, our reports include tailored advice on how to optimise your compensation strategy to overcome any market challenges, such as inflation, while improving your competitiveness. 

Compensation benchmarking can be applied to most roles for which there is market data, from manager level to C-suite executives. Benchmarking is particularly valuable for roles that are difficult to fill, rapidly evolving, or critical to your strategic goals.

For organisations with unique or hybrid roles, we provide tailored benchmarking by identifying comparable positions across the industry to ensure you’re aligning pay and benefits appropriately, even in niche areas.

In a fast-changing market, we recommend revisiting your job benchmarking data at least once a year. For industries with rapid change or high competition for talent, biannual reviews may be necessary.

Frequent updates ensure your business stays competitive and allows you to adapt to external factors like wage inflation, new competitors, or shifts in employee expectations, such as hybrid work incentives or equity offerings.

Yes, salary benchmarking doesn’t just provide data—it informs strategy. We help you align your pay and benefits practices with emerging trends, such as the increasing emphasis on performance-based pay, flexible benefits, and equity or incentive structures.

By understanding market dynamics and employee expectations, we guide you in creating a compensation strategy that positions your organisation as an employer of choice, while supporting your long-term business goals.

We provide talent and market mapping and competitor insights to complement our salary benchmarking service:

Talent and market mapping reveals where talent pools are located within your industry, helping you understand the pipeline for critical skills and roles. This synchronises with benchmarking to ensure your compensation packages align with the skills and experience levels you’re targeting.

Competitor insights provides a broader understanding of your market position, including analysis into the recruitment strategies, employer branding, and benefits offered by others in your sector. Together, these services provide a comprehensive view of how your business can attract and retain the best talent while maintaining a competitive edge.