Gearing Up For Year End
It’s hard to believe that we are now past Labor Day. I’m sure many of you are asking the same question that I am, where did 2025 go? Well, the good news is that we still have 4 great months ahead of us and Football season has just started!
OK, let’s get back to business here – with the last quarter of the business cycle quickly approaching it is time to focus on a few key business items that need to be addressed. In the world of HR, one of those items is budgeting for salary or merit increases for 2026. Included in this blog, you’ll find the link for a great report from PayScale which is the company we have used for years to do compensation benchmarking for our clients.
The report is over 100 pages long and shows salary budget data sliced and diced in many different ways depending on your location, revenue size, and industry, so you don’t need to review the entire report. The data is consolidated from thousands of companies that participate in formal salary surveys each year. I would strongly advise you review the information before making your internal decisions around your salary planning budgets going into 2026 budget cycles. This information is highly useful and a great starting point to set your budgets with your finance organizations. Remember, this is a starting point for budgetary purposes for salary planning. You can click below for the report.
If you have read our blogs over the past few years, you’ll know that setting the budget is just the beginning of the process. When you get down to actually determining who will get what increase for 2026, make sure you follow the philosophy of Pay for Performance. The better the employee performs, the better the salary increase should be for them. That’s the simple answer, more to come in another blog later this year, where we’ll dive into the subject in further detail.
With that, enjoy the start of football season, I hope your team does well this year; or if you’re not a football fan, enjoy that first pumpkin spice latte! I’ll talk with you in a few weeks.
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