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 burden divisor
An hourly cost rate on file for someone may or may not already include the extra cost of employing them beyond their take-home pay — things like employer payroll taxes and the employer's share of benefits. If the rate is loaded with those extra costs, comparing it directly against a salary band would overstate what the person actually takes home, because the band describes base pay, not the fully loaded cost of employing them.
The burden divisor exists to correct for this. It is a single adjustment factor an owner sets once: if rates are already base pay only, the divisor is left at its neutral setting and nothing changes. If rates are loaded with the extra employer costs, the divisor is set to the multiple by which they are loaded, and VERA divides the loaded cost by that multiple before comparing it to a band.
The test for what belongs in that multiple is simple: does the cost scale with what the person is paid? Employer payroll taxes, employer contributions toward benefits, and retirement matching all scale directly with pay, so they belong in the divisor. Costs that exist because the agency exists — administrative fees paid to a payroll provider, per-seat software fees, wire or transaction fees, recruiting, equipment, office space — do not scale with any individual's pay and do not belong in the divisor, even when they are billed per person. A flat per-person fee is still an operating expense, not a labor cost, if it does not move when that person's pay moves.
Both the fully loaded figure and the divided-down figure that results are shown side by side wherever this comparison appears, along with the divisor that was actually applied, so the two numbers always reconcile and nothing about the adjustment is hidden.
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, where 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.