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
Hover a segment for the exact percentage on small slices.
Job Description Mgmt
New Hire Offer Review
Job & Comp Structure
Bonus Design
Bonus Administration
Executive Comp
Equity Design
Equity Administration
Pay Equity
Sales Comp Design
Sales Comp Calc
Perf Management
Annual Comp Decisions
Market Benchmarking
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