A Salary Budget Survey offers participants insight into how other organizations are budgeting for pay increases, including merit increases, market adjustments, cost of living adjustments for inflation, and promotions. Payscale’s Salary Budget Survey, now in its seventh year, collects data from the United States, Canada, and 14 international locations.
Compensation planning for pay increases is a hot topic for a lot of organizations right now, especially with inflation at over eight percent, a forty year high, which would completely erode the value of the standard three percent pay increase.
Employees are paying attention to this and demanding higher pay increases from their employers. Others are simply leaving for job opportunities on the open market that pay more than they think they will get by remaining with the same organization.
So, what are organizations going to do about pay increases in the coming year to offset this situation? The truth is likely to be varied, but a good place to start is to collect data.
And how Payscale’s Salary Budget Survey can help. Now open for participation, Payscale’s Salary Budget Survey is an annual survey that helps compensation practitioners understand how companies are budgeting for compensation increases in the current year (2022) and upcoming year (2023). It also includes insights into promotion, merit, and other types of annual compensation changes (e.g., COLA).
Payscale’s Salary Budget Survey has been running for seven years (formerly through Payfactors, which merged with Payscale in 2021) and is considered a detailed and pragmatic resource for compensation planning akin to what survey publishers like Mercer, Willis Towers Watson, Aon Radford, and others release.
If you want to see what the report contains, the most current version can be downloaded from Payscale.com for free.
Data points of interest to HR leaders and compensation professionals include:
Salary Increase Budgets
Are salary increase budgets going to be higher or lower than the prior year? 2020-2021 saw lower pay increase budgets. 2021-2022 saw higher pay increase budgets. 2022-2023 is shaping up to be higher yet, but how high? Payscale’s Salary Budget Survey will provide the percent that employers intend to give. It will also include the percent of employees receiving a base salary increase as well as a breakdown of actual 2022 increases compared to anticipated 2023 budgets for pay increases broken down by employee type (non-exempt, exempt, managers, and executives).
Salary Structure Increase Budgets
In addition to the actual and anticipated percent increases for salary increase in 2022 and 2023, Payscale’s Salary Budget Survey will also provide the typical frequency of salary structure changes, which have been more volatile in recent years and may have accelerated even further in the last year. Again, this analysis will compare actual 2022 salary structure reviews compared to anticipated 2023.
Promotion Increase Budgets
In addition to base pay increase budgets and salary structure changes, Payscale’s Salary Budget Survey will also ask how organizations are budgeting for promotional increases. In addition to the actual promotional increases in 2022 and anticipated promotional increases in 2023, there will also be questions about the percentage of employees that receive promotions.
All aspects of Payscale’s Salary Budget survey will include a breakdown of the data by industry, sectors (public, private, nonprofit, etc.), company size (number of employees, revenue), and location (country, regions, States, and provinces in Canada).
Again, Payscale’s Salary Budget Survey is now open for participation and the data from the survey is free. However, the more employers that participate, the more valuable and actionable the data.
