Salary benchmarks are useful and routinely misread. A published range of 25 to 45 lakh for a role tells you almost nothing on its own, because the spread is doing all the work and the report rarely explains what drives it.
What sits inside a published range
A single quoted range usually blends several variables that are not interchangeable:
- City, a role in Bengaluru and the same role in Indore can differ by 30% or more.
- Company type, multinational, domestic enterprise, funded startup and bootstrapped business pay on different curves.
- Fixed versus total, some reports quote fixed pay, some total cost to company, some include equity at a notional value.
- Experience band, an eight-year and a fourteen-year candidate frequently appear in the same quoted band.
- Recency, data collected eighteen months ago is stale in fast-moving skill pockets.
Before using a benchmark, establish which of those it controls for. If the report does not say, treat it as a directional signal rather than a number.
Build a range from the bottom up instead
- 1Identify five to eight companies you would genuinely hire this person from.
- 2Establish what those specific companies pay for the level, not what the sector pays.
- 3Adjust for your city and, honestly, for your employer brand relative to theirs.
- 4Decide the premium you will pay for a candidate who clears the bar comfortably.
- 5Set the range you will actually approve, and hold to it.
This produces a narrower and far more useful range than any published report, because it reflects the specific market you are hiring from.
For candidates: the same logic in reverse
Quoting a published range in a negotiation is weak, because the employer knows the spread is wide. What works is specificity: what comparable companies pay for your level, what you are currently on including variable pay, and what the total package needs to be for you to move. Anchoring on a defensible number beats anchoring on a large one.
The useful question is not what the market pays. It is what the eight companies you would actually hire from pay, this quarter, in this city.
Watch the variable component
Two offers with identical headline numbers can differ substantially once variable pay is examined. Ask what proportion of the target bonus was actually paid in each of the last three years. In sectors where variable pay is a large share of the package, that single question changes how offers compare.