13 Top Salary Benchmark/Comparison Tools For HR Professionals

Human resources (HR) professionals need to design competitive bonus plans that tempt qualified workers to join their offerings and guarantee that current employees are inspired and more active in their work.

This is when the importance of salary benchmarking tools is realized to help HR specialists employ the best salary comparison tools to decide on pay in the search for hiring and retaining effective personnel management. 

Businesses can better align their salary formats with regional norms and professional standards with the tools we’ve discussed. In the following post, we will explore the best salary benchmarking tools, which have become the go-to tool for HR managers.

Here’s a table that lists the top tools so that you can get the basics covered without much ado! And we’ve provided a detailed synopsis per tool in the post that follows.

Why is salary benchmarking important? 

Salary benchmarking offers a lot of benefits; not only to the organizations but also to the prospective candidates. For the organizations, they get to analyze the worth of the package they will be offering to the employee. Taking the different components of the salary package into account, the companies can determine whether or not their top performers will stay with them for the long term. 

Apart from this, salary benchmarking provides accurate insights into the remuneration that allows them to provide valuable and effective benefits to their employees without any discrimination, which indirectly causes company growth. This helps in securing top talent through a realistic employee value proposition without making employees feel left out.

The potential employees get to know if their salary package meets the current industry standards and have received the correct increments after serving the company for a specific period.

Moreover, candidates get to know whether they are expecting the correct salary package from their employer and do not sound unreasonable to them. This also removes any misunderstandings in performance appraisal methods as the system is transparent with a level playing field.

Key Features to look for in Salary Benchmarking Tools

Effective salary benchmarking tools combine the following features to assist organizations in providing fair compensation practices:

• Ample Data Collection: These tools collect pay data from various sources, including industry surveys, job promotions, and state records. 
• Job Matching: Many tools help HRs to match specific job responsibilities within their company to similar roles in the external job market. This provides accurate and relevant pay comparisons.
• Percentile Rankings: Salary benchmarking tools often offer details on a specific salary’s percentile placement. Associations can use this report to decide whether their pay is below or above the market average.
• Benefits and Perks Report: Besides base salary, several tools offer details on additional pay segments like bonuses, incentives, benefits, and perks. 
• Market Segmentation: Tools should enable data segmentation into various segments such as geographic parts, enterprises, firm sizes, and so on. This granularity allows HR experts to make more authentic comparisons.
• Visualization: Users can successfully diagnose benchmarking data using simple, coherent visualizations like graphs and charts. The salary ranges, percentiles, and trends are revealed with visual models.

By knowing what the market actually is offering, employers can add in that little extra, like employee rewards and gifts, to keep workers enthusiastic and feeling appreciated. Keeping the above points in mind, let’s check out the top salary benchmarking tools available at your disposal.

Salary.com

Salary.com provides a user-friendly tool that is committed to simplifying your salary benchmarking. It’s quite a famous resource among HR professionals and employers, offering a wide range of payment solutions and insightful trends in analytical data.

The platform even forms job publicity for employers by operating SEO tools and applicable keywords, helping lure top-tier candidates.

If you’re a job seeker, Salary.com verifies for assessing your position within the job market. The best part is that their online tool is available for free!

Features:

• Offers a range of compensation segments like salary surveys, calculators, and job descriptions.
• Employers can readily get access to opportunities like job postings, salary surveys, and wage calculators.
• Provides detailed reports with salary, bonuses, and benefits data.
• Offers educational content: podcasts, articles, career development tools.
• Keeps the HR professionals updated on current salary trends.

Salry.com also helps you to calculate how you stack up against your coworkers and opponents, which is fortunate if you are confident that you deserve to be paid more. It defines what kind of compensation you should receive, ensuring your earning potential is transparent and equitable.

Salary Expert

Salary Expert is an excellent solution for job seekers and HR specialists. It glorifies businesses with valuable packages that motivate them to set competitive bonus targets for their personnel while taking into account current market trends and equitable comparisons. This practice increases fairness by enriching their HR processes and staff retention rates.

Features:

• Employ custom regions for moderate pay rates across locations.
• Factor in labor and cost of living variances, including minimum wage and FLSA advisories.
• Import job details and render salary summaries.
• Access complete compensation databases from 14,600 job titles, 1,100 industries, and 9,500 locations.

The Salary Expert tool’s cost-free status is a significant advantage. People are free to determine how much they are worth professionally. Users can fulfill their study in a secure environment thanks to the platform’s rigid confidentiality policies and assurance of the accuracy of its data.

Payscale

Payscale is at the forefront of staying updated with the latest salary trends. They deliver progressive analytics on salary criteria to users. They can assist you in reaching your existing income level to market trends by employing AI-powered recruitment tools and others. In this manner, you can gain beneficial insights about your present job performance.

Features:

• Suggests salary statement for informed career and compensation choices.
• Assists job inquiries based on salary, location, and industry.
• Provides career resources for job seekers, changers, and employers.
• Features a cost of occupancy calculator for city comparisons.
• Offers negotiation tips to boost employee salaries.

Payscale provides multiple in-office solutions for managing employee salary arrangements on the Human Resources side. For example, a tool called MarketPay facilitates the management of all your pay-related provisions through user-friendly software. The most promising factor is that Payscale can safely keep this data in the cloud, giving you ongoing access whenever required.

Economic Research Institute

The ERI (Economic Research Institute) has become an authorized source for benchmarking solutions by specializing in providing compensation data. With years of experience, ERI provides crucial tools designed specifically for HR and compensation experts.

These tools allow professionals to create pay scales, calculate labor expenses, form long-term pay structures, and more.

Features:

• Designs a range of sales incentive plans with compensation schedules and draws stipends for the sales metrics.
• Creates customized corporate profiles, including internal job postings.
• Centralise wage surveys for easier management.
• Combines internal data with recently updated market rates.

You can confidently compare your compensation network to other industries or similar markets by using ERI’s data in your job benchmarking process. It has a sizable compensation database accompanied by advanced software that analyses the data and is designed to meet your particular needs as a compensation specialist.

Mercer

Mercer stands out as a prominent salary benchmarking tool, offering priceless features. It’s recognized for fair pay between genders, strategic Human Resources planning, and comprehensive pay scales gathered from a global perspective.

Additionally, Mercer offers a useful tool for coworkers to predict possible income growth inside their association. This precognition gives businesses the power to plan strategies and promotes employee satisfaction.

Features:

• iMercer’s pay surveys and reports provide verified data for multiple career positions, regardless of experience level.
• Offers extensive information, irrespective of your interest in local, national, or international pay data. 
• You can stay current on recent salary trends and address inconsistencies in your incentives strategy.
• It helps ensure that your approach to employee pay planning is consistent.

While iMercer mainly serves as a consulting firm for Human Resource companies and associations, its benefits also extend to individuals.

Carta

Carta supplies you with an explicit pass to salary information that is driven by market trends. This data is generally based on characteristics such as your coequals in the industry, specific job types, and geographical locations, even down to specialized job roles.

This also helps you determine the most cost-effective metropolises to compel talent. It offers tools to plan and forecast the costs of hiring talent in different businesses across the United States.

Features:

• Presents an in-depth view of employee salary vs. market norms.
• Helps set accurate employee pay grades within the association.
• Entrance salary and equity info from 100 HRIS integrations.
• Instantly link with platforms like Rippling, Workday, and more for dedicated data sourcing.

Their crew of experts assists you in accomplishing these insights and confirming that your employee roster is aligned correctly, and they offer this service at no added cost. 

The primary purpose behind starting the Comp Tool program was to devise an inexpensive yet fully operative market pricing tool that HR professionals can navigate. Whether you’re operating with a single salary survey or multiple ones, CompTool simplifies the organization and accelerates the survey search function. 

Features:

• Classify your current matches neatly for compliance with salary survey providers.
• A team of genuine Compensation practitioners is ready to aid you.
• Model pay networks and instant KPIs and metrics for the new system.
• Their salary survey tool facilitates the survey proposal process for you.

Their Account administrative team boasts at least 15 years of hands-on expertise in payment management. Even its founder has a background as a compensation professional, having designed CompTool while busily directing compensation programs across the U.S. and U.K. within regular office hours.

HR360

HR360 produces a thorough and all-encompassing view of human resources and the lawful facets of employee advantages surrounding federal and state regulations. One of its key segments, the ‘salary benchmark’ tool, gives profound insights into the availability and utilization of additional benefits. 

Features:

• Wage comparisons for similar job roles within the same job relative.
• Proof of salary percentiles and 50-state comparison chart.
• Compare multiple jobs’ salaries in a single location.
• Customizable cover page and Inclusive table of contents.

This is broken down based on aspects like job roles and industry types. The details are portrayed as proportions, showing the ratio of employees who can access or are part of specific benefits. Additionally, it offers average benefit details, such as the typical count of paid leaves given to employees annually.

Also read: Best employee referral software to streamline your recruitment process.

OpenComp 

OpenComp has partnered with over 20 HRIS and equity management providers. This alliance enables the daily automation of pay data input and updates. This uniform update confirms that you always have the most recent payment information available, which is crucial for properly handling company finances, elevating fair pay practices, and retaining top-performing staff. 

• Run automated benchmarking with a precision level of 95%.
• Research compensation information for over 3,400 roles.
• Set your competitiveness relative to colleagues.
• Simulate various scenarios and policies using modeling.

OpenComp proposes key elements such as compensation standards, statistics, and insights, allowing corporations to assemble better-informed financial programs and promote a more honest work environment.

PayNorthEast

Knowing how to offer competitive salaries will allow you to attract and keep the best personnel in your business. With PayNorthEast, a refined salary benchmarking tool, you can quickly access, inspect, and compare compensation information for more than 950 job roles in more than 750 different urban and non-urban zones across the United States.

Features:

• The updated Salary Report of the Tool has new features like a personalized cover page.
• A clear explanation of salary percentiles and a five-year analysis of wage trends.
• Provides chart comparing wages across all 50 states.
• Wage comparison is accessible for similar job positions within the same job category.

The platform is free for firms with up to 50 employees. PayNorthEast presents various pricing tiers and assistance for larger enterprises according to their demands and size.

LaborIQ

LaborIQ aimed to revolutionize the field of HR Tech by delivering developed labor market software that empowers HR professionals. They aim to provide intuitive tools for over 20,000 job positions with up-to-date salary insights. This helps associations identify pay disparities and minimize employee turnover. 

Features:

• Monthly salary updates validated against 8.6 million pay stubs from 400,000 U.S. enterprises for accuracy.
• Presents compensation insights for 20,000 job positions, assisting in identifying pay gaps and lessening employee turnover.
• Promotes precise salary range structure for industry competitiveness and transparent pay procedures.

Presently, LaborIQ serves many users by swiftly handling their conditions linked to compensation, salary comparisons, employee retention, and forecasts about job market trends for various parts across the United States. The LaborIQ software functions as a broad solution for recruiting, filling vacancies, and fairly paying any job role.

Pave

Design, share, and assess your compensation plans with this perfect salary benchmark tool. Pave provides a platform for industry founders, leaders, and HR experts to improve their compensation choices and ditch the complexity of spreadsheets. This is possible through associations with HRIS, ATS, and Cap Table. 

Features:

• Employ verified job and level reports to ensure authentic data retrieval.
• Compare various roles simultaneously to decide on fair compensation.
• Incorporate with your HRIS and cap table for up-to-date and clear information.
• Survey data based on company stage, location, role, and level for deeper insights.

By combining your HRIS and cap table tools, you can tap into an expansive database of salary information from various private companies for as long as you use Pave. Pave links straight to your central data sources, establish employee tiers, and remove the need for working with spreadsheets.

Lattice

Lattice offers ample tools to make employee paycheck, performance, and engagement more accessible. All these roles are combined in one user-friendly interface, simplifying your HR processes.

With Lattice, you can readily design and supervise workflows for defining and adjusting salaries, ensuring consistency and clarity for managers and employees. The platform even provides HR experts with benchmarking data to assist them in making beneficial payment preferences.

Features:

• Include benchmarking data to organize bonuses and equity.
• Execute multi-level approval flows for various functions.
• Customize performance appraisal templates.
• Facilitate thorough feedback through 360-degree assessments.
• Merge with numerous platforms, including ADP, Google Workspace, Slack, and more.

Lattice makes record-keeping easier by storing employee paycheck records and letting you estimate how the payment method fits with your business goals and financial pursuits. Furthermore, the tool assists in initiating employee-focused memos that help people understand the variables that impact their salary.

Conclusion

No matter how big or small your company or industry, utilizing salary comparison tools is wise. These tools oblige in deciding whether your current compensation offerings are in line with market standards. 

They also deliver the advantage of keeping up-to-date salary statements, which is vital for planning successful payment and reward schemes to entice future hiring and retain current employees. Some of these comparisons provide influential insights into HR best practices, such as hiring skilled applicants and managing new team members.

Next up, the best employee management software to streamline your workforce.