Pay Raise Calculator: See Your New Salary Instantly

A raise usually gets discussed as a single number, either a percentage or a dollar amount, and it can be hard to picture what that actually means for your paycheck. Enter your current salary and either figure, and this calculator fills in the other one along with your new monthly pay.

Percentage raise versus dollar raise

A percentage raise scales with your current salary, so a 5 percent raise means something very different at 40,000 dollars than it does at 120,000 dollars. A dollar raise is a fixed amount regardless of your starting salary. Employers sometimes quote whichever number sounds better for the situation, so it is worth converting between the two to see the actual figure either way, this calculator does that conversion in both directions.

What counts as a typical raise

Annual merit raises in the United States have typically landed in the 3 to 5 percent range in recent years, according to compensation surveys from firms like Mercer and WTW, though the exact figure moves with the broader economy and varies by industry and company performance. A raise tied to a promotion or a significant expansion of responsibilities is usually larger than a standard annual merit increase, since it reflects a change in role rather than a cost-of-living or performance adjustment.

Using the number in a negotiation

Knowing your new monthly figure, not just the annual one, makes a raise easier to compare against real costs like rent or a loan payment. It is also useful going into a negotiation: if you know what dollar amount a given percentage actually represents, you can counter a low percentage offer with the specific dollar figure you are actually looking for, rather than negotiating in the abstract.