Overview
Survey Overview
Compensation Team Resourcing has been the focus of our annual research for the past three years. That research has now evolved into something bigger: an always-on, dynamic benchmark that gives our profession a continuous pulse on how comp teams are resourced.
Compensation team staffing benchmarks
| Benchmark Percentiles | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Metric | 10th | 25th | 50th | 75th | 90th |
# of Comp Professionals Raw headcount on the compensation team | 5 | 15 | 29 | 43 | 58 |
Employees per Comp Professional Company employees divided by comp team size — indicator of scope | 483 | 580 | 748 | 952 | 1,229 |
Comp Team as a % of HR Comp team size divided by total HR headcount — indicator of priority | 11% | 13% | 16% | 20% | 25% |
| Based on 112 respondents matching current filters. 50th percentile = median. | |||||
Role types on comp team
% with this role type (multi-select)
TR Hybrid
Analysts
Regional Leads
Business Partners
Specialized Expertise
Program Owners
Generalists
Responsibility ownership
In general, we find that compensation teams consistently play a consultative role on broad compensation matters and own the design of salary programs. However, other areas of design or administration are less consistent. We see a notable trend in compensation team size based on the presence of sales compensation administration within the work portfolio. Other disciplines do not have a consistent effect on team size, controlling for other factors.
Compensation Team
Another Function
Outsourced
Does Not Exist
Job Description Mgmt
100%
New Hire Offer Review
100%
Job & Comp Structure
100%
Bonus Design
100%
Bonus Administration
100%
Executive Comp
100%
Equity Design
100%
Equity Administration
100%
Pay Equity
100%
Sales Comp Design
100%
Sales Comp Calc
100%
Perf Management
100%
Annual Comp Decisions
100%
Market Benchmarking
64%
Compensation Team Size vs. Employee Size
Compensation team size vs. company employee count. Filtered by current selections.
In all exhibits, the following legend applies:
| Shape = Industry | Not Tech | Tech |
| Color = Global Scale | Global | Not Global |
| Outline = Sales Comp | orNo Sales Comp | orOwns Sales Comp |
All Respondents
n = 112 · Click to expand