Services
Salary benchmarking Australia — compensation made defensible.
Compensation is the quietest mess in most growth-stage Australian teams. The first ten hires were paid on gut. The next twenty came in via offer-letter inflation — each new hire bumped a little to close, each one invisibly resetting the band. Then a manager asks why their report earns less than the new joiner, and there is no good answer. That is the moment a comp framework stops being a nice-to-have.
We build the layer between gut-feel and a full in-house compensation team. Salary benchmarking against the Australian market, pay bands tied to roles and levels, a written raise philosophy, and a benefits review that covers the things candidates actually ask about — super above the SG, salary packaging, leave loadings, parental leave top-ups, and the bits of the modern award that quietly set your floor.
A defensible framework looks like this. Every role maps to a level. Every level has a band — a min, a mid and a max — anchored to a target market percentile and a named source. Raises follow a written policy: how performance, market movement and promotions interact, how often bands refresh, and who signs off. New offers land inside the band by default; exceptions are written down with a reason, not back-channelled in Slack. When a manager asks why X earns more than Y, the answer is a sentence, not a story.
The Australian specifics matter and they are easy to get wrong. Super is moving — the SG rate, the concept of total remuneration packages, and how you express "package vs. base" on offers all change how a candidate reads your number. Salary packaging via novated leases and the FBT rules around them shift the real value of a role. Modern award minimums quietly set the legal floor on classifications you might not even realise are covered. Long service leave, leave loadings and casual loadings show up in total cost but rarely in the headline. We make all of that legible — to you, to your board, and to the candidate reading the offer.
Equity sits in its own bucket. We help design the layer that founders usually own — equity bands by level, refresh policy, the cash-versus-equity conversation at hiring, and how to talk about ESOP without overselling it. Legal drafting, valuations and the tax structuring of an ESS scheme partner with your employment lawyer and tax adviser; we are not a substitute for either. This pairs naturally with HR strategy and workforce planning work, where headcount and band design get costed together rather than in two separate spreadsheets, and with performance management so that raises are tied to a review cycle that holds up under scrutiny.
Pay people fairly — and tell them why.
Defensible bands, AU-specific benchmarking, and a written raise philosophy your managers can actually quote. Senior comp design without the cost of an in-house comp team.
Book a comp reviewAU benchmarks
Triangulated, not single-sourced
Defensible bands
Levels, ranges and rationale
Equity-aware
ESOP design, lawyer-partnered
Senior only
No junior handoffs
What's in scope
Benchmarking
Salary benchmarking, Australia
Triangulated ranges by role and level against the AU market — paid datasets where you have them, peer bands, live offer data and recent comparable hires. You get a target percentile and a written rationale, not just a number.
Pay bands
Pay band design
A levelling framework that fits your team — function, level and band — with min, mid and max anchored to your market positioning. Built so new offers land inside the band by default and exceptions are written down.
Framework
Compensation framework & raise philosophy
A written policy for how raises, promotions and market movement interact, who signs off, and how often bands refresh. The document a new manager reads on day one to answer "why does X earn more than Y".
Benefits & equity
Benefits & equity review
A review of super, salary packaging, leave loadings, parental leave and the rest of the package candidates actually ask about. Plus equity band design and refresh policy — partnered with your lawyer and tax adviser for the structuring layer.
How it works
- 01
Benchmark
We map every current role to a level, pull AU market data from multiple sources, and surface where you sit today — by role, by function, and against your stated market positioning. Includes a pay-equity sweep so gaps surface before an audit does.
- 02
Design bands
We build the levelling framework, set min/mid/max for each band, and write the raise philosophy and refresh cadence. Equity bands and benefits sit alongside cash so the full package is legible in one place.
- 03
Roll out & maintain
We help you communicate the framework to managers, retro-fit current pay (red-circling where needed), and stand up the rhythm — annual refresh, mid-year spot checks, and offer-by-offer guardrails so the bands stay defensible.
FAQ
Which benchmarking sources do you use for Australian roles?
How often should we refresh salary bands?
Do you advise on ESOP and equity, or partner with specialists?
How do you handle gender pay gap reporting and audits?
What do we do about people who already sit outside the new band?
Related services
Comp does not sit on its own. It pairs with HR strategy and workforce planning when headcount and band design need to be costed together, and with hiring, recruiting and onboarding so live offers land inside the bands instead of resetting them.
If raises are tied to performance, see performance management and manager coaching. If pay-equity, contracts or modern award classifications are part of the picture, HR compliance, policies and handbooks and employee relations and conflict resolution are the natural partners.
More about how we work and who runs this on the about page, and current open roles we are hiring for are a good window into the comp ranges we are seeing in the AU market right now.
Get bands you can defend.
A 30-minute intro call to walk through where comp is breaking, what a defensible framework would look like, and what a first 60 days together would deliver.