Employment

Understand Salary Negotiation By Understanding These Negotiation Statistics

salary negotiation feature image
Written by Faizan Patankar
Less than half – 43 percent – of PayScale Salary Negotiation survey respondents have ever asked for a raise in their current field. For the 57 percent who have not asked, the reasons most often cited are:
  • My employer gave me a raise before I needed to ask for one (38 percent)
  • I’m uncomfortable negotiating salary (28 percent)
  • I didn’t want to be perceived as pushy (19 percent)
PayScale Salary Negotiation
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Guide to Salary Negotiation

PayScale’s Salary Negotiation Guide includes more than 15 total articles, including in-depth analysis of PayScale’s recent Salary Negotiation study. The survey polled 31,000 people between 10/1/14 and 11/24/14 who took the PayScale Salary Survey to find out if they had ever negotiated their salary, how successful they were, and if they hadn’t, what was holding them back.

Salary Negotiation survey result takeaway:

  • The higher your annual salary, the more likely you are to have asked for a raise and the more likely you are (with just a few exceptions) to have received it. While only 25 percent of those earning $10K-$20K received the raise they requested, 70 percent of those earning more than $150K received their requested raise.
  • Women are more likely than men to state that they are uncomfortable in starting salary negotiation – 31 percent vs. 23 percent – and that holds true even among C-level executives where 26 percent of female Chief Executives said they’re uncomfortable negotiating salary compared to 14 percent of male Chief Executives.
  • The gender split between people who negotiate was largest in the Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction industry. More women than men in this industry have asked for a salary raise (51 percent vs. 40 percent), but men in the mining industry are also more likely to report that they received a salary raise without having to ask or have always been happy with their salary. For those that do ask for a salary increase, women in this field appear to be a bit more likely to receive the increase they requested (54 percent of women vs. 47 percent of men).
  • Women holding an MBA degree seem to be struggling most with potential gender bias when it comes to salary negotiation. Of those who asked for a raise, only 48 percent of female MBA grads received the requested raise compared to 63 percent of male MBA grads. And, 21 percent of female MBA grads received no raise at all after requesting one, compared to 10 percent of male MBA grads.
  • Gen Y is far less likely to have indulged in salary negotiation and far more likely to be uncomfortable negotiating or worried about being perceived as pushy. Both likely stem from lack of experience. Baby Boomers, however, are more likely to say they didn’t negotiate salary for fear of losing their job, which could indicate a concern over age bias in the workplace.
  • Workers with low job satisfaction are more likely to ask for a raise (54 percent) than those with high job satisfaction (41 percent), but only 19 percent of people with low job satisfaction receive the salary raise they asked for, whereas 44 percent of workers with high job satisfaction receive the salary increase they requested.

About the author

Faizan Patankar

I started Career Geek Blog in 2011 to share my experience in job-hunting. I now focus on careers industry and blogging is just a tool to share that info. Love hacking careers. During the day I focus on my hobby - Engineering.