MARCH 2024  15 
an employee should be paid with its 
resource of salary information for 
similar jobs in the job market. When 
pricing for jobs in your company, this 
tool can provide you with updated 
information on the Median Salary of 
specific job titles.
HOW IS THE MEDIAN 
SALARY A RELIABLE 
GAUGE TO DETERMINE 
COMPETITIVE PAY?
When planning compensation, the 
Median Salary is an effective starting 
point that can help employers form 
better decisions around salary struc­
tures for each employee, job title, and 
even for the entire company. Some 
employers may calculate the Mean 
Salary of a given data set of incomes 
but the Median Pay provides a more 
accurate measure of central tendency 
because it discounts the extremes 
that may skew the results to make it 
look like it is normal to earn more. 
	
In reality, wages differ among 
employees in the same job family and 
industry because they differ in years 
of experience, educational back­
ground, skills, and performance. In a 
typical corporate setup, a few senior 
executives get higher pay because of 
their scope of work and level of work 
experience, and their wage might 
create a significant gap between that 
of the average employees who are in 
the same age group, years of work ex­
perience, and scope of functions. 	
	
The high pay of these execu­
tives will be an outlier and will give 
misleading results if an employer 
uses the Mean Salary because this 
method of reporting does not consid­
er extreme variation. In this case, 
pursuing the Mean Salary might lead 
the employer to overspend on com­
pensation.
	
CompAnalyst is a tool that 
allows employers to price jobs fairly 
and with confidence. With its large 
pool of reliable HR-reported data, 
you can pull salary information from 
the market to compare wages across 
companies and industries and calcu­
late a Median Pay on which you can 
base your compensation plan.
WHAT ARE THE FACTORS 
THAT AFFECT MEDIAN 
SALARY?
Three primary factors that affect Me­
dian salary and can provide insights 
into the difference in pay among 
employees.
Occupation 
One factor that affects the Median 
salary of employees is their occu­
pations. Certain professions have 
higher median salaries because they 
require a higher level of education 
and specialized skills. Working con­
ditions of a job also affect the Median 
wage where the inherent danger, 
health, and safety risks demand a 
higher pay to compensate for these 
hazards.
Demographics 
Another reason why the Median 
wage differs is the age, sex, and edu­
cation level of an employee. People 
who are older usually earn a higher 
Median wage because they have been 
likely working for a longer period 
and have gained more experience in 
their field. In the 2023 third-quarter 
report of the Bureau of Labor Statis­
tics (BLS) about the Usual Weekly 
Earnings of Wage and Salary work­
ers, we can find the women’s-to-men’s 
earnings ratio and it tells us how 
much a woman earns compared to 
their male counterparts working for 
the same job. 
	
It also allows us to deeply under­
stand the gender pay difference as the 
data intersects with race and ethnici­
ty. For example, the BLS reported that 
white women earned 82.9 percent 
as much as their male counterparts, 

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