Something to readCompensation
Introducing our Open Salary System
A 31-minute essay on how Buffer sets every salary in public, and why
Why it’s worth your time
Joel Gascoigne argues that most companies keep how they set pay out of view, which is what makes his essay on Buffer's salary system worth the half hour. He lays out how the company turns market data into a salary for every role and level, and what ten years of public pay taught it. Seeing one version in full can make your own employer's choices easier to ask about.
Questions to ask about how your pay is set
The essay · 31 min · Free
How to get it
Opens their site. We don’t copy it here; we’d rather they get the read.
- Read the essay.
Look for three parts: the section titled The Buffer Salary System; the explanation of why Buffer doesn't negotiate; and Gascoigne's account of an offer that broke the formula.
- Ask one question about how pay is set where you work.
Write down what you don't know about pay at your company. Pick the question you'd most like answered and ask your manager or HR this month.
You“I'd like to understand how pay is set here. Do we have levels, and how does someone move from one to the next?”
Good moments for this: before your annual reviewwhen you're offered a new titlebefore a pay conversation
Keep going with Truest
Small actions add up. Truest helps you find the next thing worth doing, make the space to do it, and keep a record of your progress. It’s a private place to work on your career, and it’s yours, not your employer’s.
- It actually happensWe’ll put it on your calendar and remind you before it starts.
- Kept with the thing it was aboutSave what comes back in your Vault, next to the work it was about.
- It’s yours to keepEach thing you do is saved to your private record, there when your next review or job search comes around.
Anything else we can help you with this week?
Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
He writes that most companies keep their pay methods private because it strengthens their hand in negotiation; your employer may also be weighing people's privacy. Asking how the system works tends to be a gentler start than asking what a colleague earns.
What might make this harder
Ask the narrowest version you can: what level your own role sits at, and what the next level asks for. A partial answer is still more than you had. Outside salary data helps too, and in a growing number of US states, such as Washington, many employers must now put a pay range in job postings, which can show what roles like yours pay.
Questions people ask
What is Buffer's Open Salary System?
Buffer's way of setting pay, described by its founder and CEO Joel Gascoigne in a 2024 essay: market data for companies of its size, a grid of benchmarks for every role and level, and a cost-of-living band, with every salary published.
Does Buffer negotiate salaries?
Not as of the 2024 essay. Buffer treats a negotiation as feedback on the system, and any change it makes applies to every salary the change touches.
What is a salary benchmark?
A reference salary for a role and level, usually drawn from market data. Buffer adjusts its benchmarks so pay rises by a consistent percentage from one level to the next, with steeper early steps for a few areas such as Finance and Advocacy.
How do I find out how pay is decided at my company?
Your manager or HR can usually say whether roles have levels and how often pay is compared with the market. Some companies publish their bands internally, so a handbook or intranet search is worth a minute first.
What it says, and how it holds up
Most salaries start from market data, Gascoigne notes, and his essay shows the rest of Buffer's working all the way down. Buffer, the social media tool he founded, had published every salary for ten years when he wrote it. This time the change was about making the openness real again: the numbers were still public, but outside the finance team, how they were reached had stopped being clear. The essay explains how they rebuilt the system in three separate parts: market data filtered to companies of Buffer's size, a benchmark grid for every role and level, and each person's salary, adjusted by a cost-of-living band.
For an employee, the part most worth reading may be the account of what broke. Gascoigne describes an offer, made in a high-pressure season, that paired a lower level than the role called for with a location band that didn't match the person's city, and colleagues spotted it because the numbers were public. He corrected the salary and walked the team through how it happened. He's open about the costs of openness too: changes come more slowly, it takes extra work, and some people would rather their pay weren't on view. The no-negotiation rule follows the same logic. If pay comes from the system, a case for more money becomes a case for changing the system.
When Gascoigne wrote in January 2024, Buffer was a team of 75 that chose to pay above market, with salaries falling between the 70th and 90th percentiles of its data, and it had committed to never lowering a salary when the formula changed. Those choices help hold the system up. A larger employer, or one paying at the market midpoint, may run levels and bands with none of this openness. So the essay works better as a map of questions to ask than as a standard to hold your employer to.
Buffer's no-negotiation stance is an answer to its own setup, where every salary comes from one published system. Read the essay as one company's design, not a rule for how pay works anywhere else. This explains how things usually work; it isn't financial, tax or legal advice for your situation.
You might like
More in Compensation
See allRead this alongside your role page
Tell Truest what you’re dealing with
We read every one, and we write guides for the things that come up most. Leave your email if you’d like to hear when we do.
Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.