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How to Raise a Pay Discrepancy

This isn’t asking for a raise. A raise ask spends somebody’s budget on you and a no ends it; this reports that an existing number may not match an existing rule, which goes to whoever owns the rule and survives being answered — an explained difference is information you wanted anyway. That framing is spent in the first sentence or not at all. Two more things follow. How you learned it is the landmine, and the person with the most to lose usually isn’t you: your instinct is to lead with the source because it’s the only proof you hold, and the source is the one party here who can’t un-expose themselves — while a version so vague nobody can answer it just starts a hunt for whoever talked. And a pay difference isn’t one fact: before it’s an error it can be the market on a hiring date, a scope or shift you can’t see, a location band, a retention adjustment, or a total repeated as a salary. You get the five ordinary explanations and the question that settles each, the four things you can ask about your own pay with nobody else in the sentence, the conversation drafted at no more than 160 words and safe to forward to HR unedited, the five things to get answered, and four replies for when it goes sideways.

Sample pay discrepancy plan

Generated for: Senior Claims Handler at a 400-person insurer, five years in, comparing against a joiner on the same team and the same job title who started eight months ago on more — heard in passing from a colleague, doesn’t know their shift pattern or whether they’re on call, nothing said to anybody yet

What would explain it that isn’t an error — Before this is a mistake it is several other things, and you have checked one of them. Finding out which concedes nothing: it is what turns a question that gets deflected into one that gets answered. This page cannot tell you what the law where you live says about discussing pay, what your contract says, or what your employer’s bands, review cycle or backdating practice require — those are for somebody qualified and for whoever holds them. Five things to settle first. What pay for this job was set against on the day somebody was hired — ask [HR or your manager]. Whether shift, on-call or out-of-hours sits inside the number — ask [HR]. Whether the two posts sit in the same location or band — ask [HR]. Whether any one-off or retention adjustment is in it — ask [HR]. And whether the figure you heard was a salary or a total — which you may not be able to settle at all.

The real one is written against what you actually know, what you don’t, and how the question came up — and it never carries your source. The first one is free — no card. See what a credit costs.

First one is free — no card needed.

Credits

— credits available

Describe the comparison by role— never a name, and nothing that would let anyone work out who it is. Say what’s the same and what you don’t know: level, site, shift, on-call, reporting line, when they joined. The whole point of this page is that a pay difference isn’t one fact— same title isn’t the same job, and before it’s an error it can be a hiring date, a location band, a scope you can’t see, a retention adjustment or a total being repeated as a salary. Nothing here will tell you whether you’re allowed to discuss pay, whether you’re underpaid, what your contract says, or what your employer’s bands, review cycle or backdating practice require. Those depend on where you work and where you live, and you get them back as questions with somebody attached.

Used for the register the writing is in and for what usually sits inside a number where you are — never to price anything. There isn’t a single figure anywhere in what you get back: no salary, no band, no range, no percentage, no market rate. Every one of those belongs to your employer, to somebody qualified, or to data this page doesn’t have, so the money question comes back as what is your own number set against, and who reviews it— never as an amount to ask for. A number named in this conversation turns a correction back into a negotiation.

These aren’t the same conversation. I saw a document I wasn’t meant to seeis the highest-risk one here, and the risk isn’t the pay question — it’s that raising it turns into a conversation about your conduct, which you lose whether or not the number was wrong, so that branch rebuilds the whole approach out of questions about your own pay and cites nothing. The rise I was promised never landed is not a pay-gap conversation at all, and treating it as one is what loses it. My own role is advertised higher is the strongest version on the page precisely because the source is public — nobody needs protecting and nothing needs hiding. And if you think the difference tracks something personal about you, that branch sends you to somebody qualified before you say anything and drafts no allegation either way.

This decides which section gets written. Find out whether there’s a gap at allis the most useful thing here and the one most people skip — it’s the only goal on the page where being wrong costs you nothing, and nothing else is safe to do before you know what your own number is set against. Raise it without exposing who told me works more often than readers expect, and for a structural reason: every question worth asking here is about your pay, and none of them needs a second person in the sentence. And get an answer with a date on itis the goal that fails silently — “we’ll look at it” is the most common outcome of this conversation and six months later there’s nothing to point at.

What you actually know, and what you don’t— the gaps are the useful part here, because they’re what the questions get built out of. What’s the same about the two jobs, what you can’t see, whether the figure was a salary or a total, and whether you’ve said anything to anyone yet. Please don’t name whoever told you, and don’t paste anything from a document — nothing you get back will identify, describe or narrow down a source, so putting one in only leaves it here. We never invent a figure, a band, a comparison, a conversation, a review date or a policy, and we never assume the difference is real or that it isn’t, so anything you don’t supply comes back as a bracketed placeholder or a question. Refer to people by role, no names.

1 credit per generation • Powered by GPT-4o • Takes ~15 seconds

Also explore:

How to Ask for a Raise →Asking for a Job Title Change →How to Ask for a Promotion →Performance Review Self-Assessment →Passed Over for a Promotion →