The salary is on the advert now. Here is how to read it.

For most of working life the number was the last thing you found out and the thing you were least equipped to argue about. Disclosure rules across a widening set of jurisdictions have changed that — the band is on the advert, sometimes by law, increasingly by competitive necessity because the employer next to you is publishing theirs.

What has not changed is that a posted range is a recruiting document. It is written to attract applicants and to give the hiring manager room, and it repays being read the way you would read any document written by someone with an interest in the outcome.

The width is the message

A tight band — say ten to fifteen per cent from bottom to top — usually means a real structure exists behind it: levels, bands, a compensation team, and a genuine constraint on the hiring manager. You will not negotiate far outside it, and you probably do not need to, because the band reflects something.

A band twice that wide is telling you one of three things. The role is genuinely open at more than one level and they will hire whoever turns up. Or the range spans multiple locations with different market rates. Or nobody has decided what the job is.

That last one is more common than anyone admits, and it is not automatically bad news — an undefined role is negotiable in scope as well as in salary. But it does mean the top of the band is attached to a version of the job that may not be the one offered to you.

Offers cluster below the midpoint

Bands are usually built so that the midpoint is the rate for someone fully competent in the role, with the upper quarter reserved for people who are exceeding it. Hiring into the top of a band leaves an employer with nowhere to go at the next review, and compensation teams are explicitly trying to avoid that. So most external offers land somewhere between the bottom and the middle.

This is the single most useful thing to know before the first conversation, because it tells you that the advertised maximum is not the target. Anchoring to it makes you sound as though you have not read the market; anchoring just above the midpoint, with a reason, does not.

What the range does not include

Almost always base salary only. Bonus structure, equity, pension contribution, shift or on-call premiums, car allowance, private medical and the number of days you are expected in an office are all outside it, and in several industries the variable component is a third of the total.

Two offers with identical bases can differ by a substantial margin once the employer pension contribution is included, and pension is the component people most reliably ignore because it is invisible in a monthly payslip. Ask for the percentage, and ask whether it is matched or unconditional.

What to say in the first call

The old advice — never name a number first — was written for a market where you did not have one. Now you do, and refusing to engage with a published range reads as evasive rather than shrewd.

Say something like: I saw the range on the posting. Based on what you have described, I would be looking at the upper half of it, and I would like to understand how the band is structured before we get to a specific figure.

That does three things. It confirms you are inside their range, so you are not screened out. It establishes a position without a fixed number. And it asks a question that a recruiter with a real structure can answer and a recruiter without one cannot — which is information.

If the range is absurd

Some employers responded to disclosure requirements by posting bands so wide they say nothing. It is worth naming, politely, in the first call: the posting had a very broad range, could you tell me which part of it this specific role sits in. Most recruiters will answer, because they are also irritated by it.

An organisation that will not narrow it when asked directly is telling you how the rest of the process will go.

The internal use nobody mentions

The most valuable published band may be the one for the job you already do. If your employer advertises your role externally with a range whose bottom is above your salary, that is documentation, and documentation is what a pay conversation runs on.

Take a screenshot with the date. Raise it as a question about banding rather than as a grievance: I noticed we are advertising this role at a range starting above my current salary, and I would like to understand where I sit in the band. That question has a correct answer and your manager knows it.