Do you qualify for the high end of a salary range? Probably not, says new data

As more companies have started posting job listings with pay ranges—in part due to state laws mandating some measure of pay transparency—many job seekers are now armed with more information when they enter into salary negotiations. But the salary information in job listings can also prove misleading, especially when employers provide broad pay ranges that span over $50,000 (or even up to $100,000), since prospective hires may assume they will slot into the top half of a salary band. A new report from Glassdoor finds that while job seekers often picture themselves in the middle or top of a salary band, the reality is quite different. More often than not, the salary they end up receiving is in the lower half of the range. Glassdoor found that when comparing data from hundreds of thousands of job listings to salaries from full-time employees, more than 60% of salaries for a given job were lower than the median of the pay range offered in an equivalent job listing. (The average salary range from Glassdoor’s data spanned at least $15,000, with a starting point of $61,000.) Glassdoor also found that while pay bands were often accurate—meaning, new hires received salaries that were actually within the range in the job listing—there were instances where that wasn’t the case. For 22% of job listings, the compensation reported by people holding those jobs fell below the proposed pay range. While larger employers tended to have fewer discrepancies between the pay bands in job listings and actual salaries, there was little difference when Glassdoor compared states with strong pay transparency laws (namely California, Colorado, Hawaii, New York, and Washington State) against states that did not have those laws in place. As Fast Company has previously reported, companies can risk losing promising job candidates if they regularly offer salaries on the low end of a salary range, or if their pay bands are so wide that they prove impossible for candidates to interpret. Salary ranges that are too wide can also invite scrutiny and potential fines from the agencies charged with enforcing pay transparency laws. Still, even as more states pass pay transparency laws intended to empower job seekers and make salary negotiations more equitable, it’s clear that workers should take the pay information in job listings with a grain of salt.