Salary Band and Compa-Ratio Builder

Most salary bands are written once, agreed in a meeting, and then never held up against the actual payroll again. This does that in about a minute, and it is usually the first time anybody finds out somebody is being paid below the floor the company set itself.

Put in a midpoint and a spread and it builds the band. Put in salaries and each one gets a compa-ratio — where it sits against the midpoint — and a position in the band, which is where it sits between the floor and the ceiling.

Those two are different numbers for the same person and they are confused constantly. Somebody sitting exactly on the floor of a normal band has a compa-ratio of about 83% and a position of 0%. Quote the wrong one in a pay review and the conversation goes somewhere it should not.

The band spread is read the way people actually mean it: a 40% spread puts the ceiling 40% above the FLOOR. Read as 40% either side of the midpoint it would be a wider band, a different answer for every person in it, and it would look perfectly reasonable on the screen.

The midpoint is an input. Nothing here knows what a job is worth — that comes from market data you trust, and if the midpoint is wrong then every ratio on the page is wrong in the same direction and still looks fine. A calculator that invented a market rate would be worse than no band at all, so this one does not.

Being below the floor is reported as a fact, not as a recommendation. Somebody new to a role may be there deliberately, with a plan and a date. What makes it a problem is when nobody knew.

Save as many versions as you like and put any two side by side, figure against figure, with the better one on each line marked and the difference in its own column. That screen is the one that decides things, and it is the part a free calculator cannot do at all. Save this year and last year, and the drift shows up as a number.

One HTML file. No account, no subscription, no internet needed. Opens on Windows, Mac and Android; the readme explains the extra step on iPhone and iPad, where Apple blocks JavaScript in downloaded files and every tool of this kind is affected.

Everything lives in your browser on your device. Nothing is uploaded, which is why it works offline and why nobody else can see your figures — and it also means clearing your browsing data deletes it. The tool does not pretend otherwise: the header shows how long since your last export at all times, turns amber after three days and red after seven, and export is one click that produces a plain file you keep.