Compensation
VERA can tell an owner whether a person is paid correctly for their role and seniority. This page explains where that comparison comes from and what it does and doesn't cover.
Pay always comes from the cost rate
VERA has no separate place to enter someone's salary. A person's pay is always derived from the hourly cost rate already on file for them — the same rate VERA uses everywhere else to calculate what a project costs to deliver. There is exactly one place to change what someone is paid: update their rate. Every compensation comparison VERA shows is a reflection of that rate, never an independent figure that could drift out of sync with it.
What a salary band is
A salary band is an expected pay range for a particular discipline at a particular level of seniority — for example, a range for a mid-level designer versus a senior designer. An owner defines these ranges once, and VERA then judges each person against the range that matches their discipline and level.
A person is only compared to a band once both things are true about them: they belong to a discipline, and they have a level assigned. Someone missing either is simply not benchmarked — VERA shows them as unbanded rather than guessing. This is deliberate: a comparison against the wrong range, or against no range at all, is worse than no comparison.
The employer cost multiplier
The hourly cost rate on file for someone is what that person is actually paid — their gross pay — not an already fully loaded employer cost. But for every dollar of gross pay someone takes home, an agency typically spends more than that dollar — employer payroll taxes and the employer's share of benefits add on top. A salary band describes gross pay, so the rate on file compares against it directly; what the agency spends on top of that gross figure is a separate, real number, useful in its own right, but never what a band is judged against.
The employer cost multiplier is what surfaces that extra spend. It is a single number an owner sets once, expressed the way an owner actually thinks about it: for every $1.00 of gross pay, this is what it costs to employ that person. Left at its neutral setting, gross pay and employer cost are the same figure. Set higher, VERA multiplies gross pay by that multiple to show the fully loaded employer cost alongside it — the comparison against a salary band always uses gross pay itself, never the loaded figure.
What scales with a person's pay belongs in that multiple — payroll taxes, benefits, retirement match. What doesn't scale with pay — flat operating costs like payroll admin fees, software, recruiting, or office space — doesn't, even when billed per person.
Both the gross pay figure and the fully loaded employer cost derived from it are shown side by side wherever this comparison appears, along with the multiplier that was actually applied, so the two numbers always reconcile and nothing about the adjustment is hidden.
The multiplier goes no further than these pages. A project's cost is hours × the person's own rate on the day the work happened, for a full-time employee exactly as for a contractor — so what a project cost and what it costs to employ someone stay two separate, separately checkable questions.
This multiplier never affects what anyone costs a project. Every margin, LER, and forecast figure that depends on labor cost uses hours × the person's own rate, for full-time employees and contractors alike; the multiplier is a company-level payroll figure that appears only on the compensation pages. A contractor's rate is never multiplied anywhere, for the same reason they don't appear in the salary-band comparison at all: they aren't a salaried employee, so there's no employer burden to add. See The Logic Underneath for how project cost and profitability are calculated.
Why the comparison uses a full-time figure
Not everyone works a full-time week, and a part-time schedule should never be misread as underpayment. So when VERA judges where someone falls against their band, it always asks: if this person's rate were annualized as if they worked full-time, what gross pay would that land against the band? A person's actual annual cost — based on the hours they are really scheduled for — is shown too, for visibility into what the agency actually spends, but it is never what decides whether someone reads as under, within, or above their band.
Who is and isn't benchmarked
This comparison is only meaningful for people who are paid a salary in the ordinary sense — employees who sell their time as their job. Independent contractors don't appear in this comparison at all, since they are not salaried employees in the first place and have nothing to benchmark; their cost remains fully visible wherever rates and project figures are shown, just not in this particular comparison. Vendors — people or firms engaged for a fixed-fee deliverable rather than for their time — don't appear here either; they are tracked and paid through a different mechanism entirely.
A discipline's levels form one ladder
The levels within a single discipline are not independent ranges — they are one continuous ladder from the most junior level to the most senior. The point where one level's range ends is exactly the point where the next level's range begins; there is no gap between them and no overlap. Because of that, an owner sets a discipline's whole ladder at once, as a single set of boundary points from the bottom of the most junior level to the top of the most senior, rather than typing the same boundary in twice for two adjacent levels. This keeps the ladder honest by construction — there is no way to accidentally leave a gap or create an overlap between two neighboring levels.
Linking a discipline to a standard occupation
A discipline can also be linked to a standard occupation from a public government classification of jobs — the same kind of reference used to publish regional wage data. This link is what lets VERA eventually pull in published salary figures for that kind of work, rather than relying only on the bands an owner has typed in by hand.
The link is always chosen explicitly by an owner, from a list of real occupations grouped by broad job family, and it is never guessed or inferred from a discipline's name. A fuzzy match on a name can silently land on the wrong occupation, and the result — a confident-looking but wrong salary figure — is worse than not having one at all. A discipline without a link simply isn't matched against outside wage data; it still works normally everywhere else.
Starting a ladder from published wage data
Once a discipline is linked to an occupation, an owner can pull published regional wage percentiles for that occupation and turn them into a starting salary ladder — a first draft to sanity-check, not a figure to accept blindly. The four levels are derived so that each one's range touches the next exactly, with no gap and no overlap, the same contiguous-ladder shape used everywhere else in VERA's compensation model.
Where a precise local estimate isn't published for a given location, the import falls back to a broader geography — first the surrounding region, then the whole country — but always takes an entire consistent set of figures from one geography, never a mix of local and national numbers spliced together. Every result names which geography it actually came from, so it's never mistaken for a purely local figure. Where the published data is unusable for a discipline — a wage capped at a published ceiling, or no estimate published at all — the import says so plainly rather than guessing at a number.
The result is always a starting point for a pay strategy, never a recommendation. Some agencies deliberately pay above the local market to compete for talent, and some pay below it and compete on other things — published wage data describes the market, not what any particular business should do about it.
Refreshing bands against current data
An owner can pull this comparison at any time, not just once. VERA shows what the published data currently suggests for a discipline right alongside what's already set, and the owner decides — discipline by discipline — whether to take the update. Nothing is ever applied automatically, and nothing runs on a schedule: once a band has been deliberately adjusted against the owner's own pay strategy, it carries that judgment, and a silent overwrite from a routine data refresh would erase it without a trace. Seeing the update and choosing to accept it stays a separate, explicit step every time.