The Posted-Pay Conversion Standard, Six Criteria to One Comparable Base

This standard is for anyone with a batch of open postings that quote pay in incompatible forms: hourly ranges, OTE, base bands, 1099 or C2C rates, and "varies by location." It defines when a posted pay line has been converted well enough to rank against the others, gives six pass or fail criteria, and ends with one comparable annual base figure per posting that a second grader should reproduce within 5 percent.

What is a comparable posted-pay figure?

A comparable posted-pay figure is one annual, W2-equivalent, fixed-pay number for a specific location tier, with every input flagged as stated by the posting or inferred by you. If two postings both have one, you can rank them. If either lacks one, any ranking between them is a guess.

A few terms, defined once:

• Base is fixed pay before any variable component.
• OTE (on-target earnings) is base plus the variable pay you would earn at 100% of quota.
• Pay mix is the split between base and variable inside OTE, written base first, so 70/30 means 70% base.
• W2 employee is a direct employee whose employer pays employer-side taxes and whose time off is paid.
• Agency W2 is a contractor employed on paper by a staffing agency, which pays employer FICA, usually with no paid time off and few or no benefits.
• 1099 is an independent contractor paid gross, who carries their own taxes and benefits.
• C2C (corp-to-corp) is a contractor billing through their own company, carrying the same costs plus company overhead.
• Pay zone (or location tier) is the geographic band an employer uses to set a range for a given place.

A headline number can hide all of these at once. The figure below shows the layers you peel off to get to the comparable base.

The six pass or fail criteria

A pay line passes the standard only when all six criteria below pass; any single fail makes the record provisional. Each criterion proves one thing, and each has a recognisable way of lying.

Some grading rules that keep two people consistent:

• Basis fails on any open-ended line ("up to $X", "$X and up"). Do not convert it to a midpoint.
• Variable split is N/A, not fail, when the basis is already stated base, for example a compliant range in California or New York City.
• Location tier fails when the zone is unpinned. The record keeps a figure, but it ranks as provisional.
• Source flag passes only when all five other fields carry a stated or inferred mark. An inferred value can still pass its own criterion. The flag just tells the reader how much weight it bears.
• Range point is fixed by policy. This standard uses the midpoint of the range for your pinned zone. Reading a padded range down to a floor is a separate decision and belongs after ranking, not inside it.

Why every conversion assumption must be fixed in policy

The 5 percent agreement target is only reachable if every conversion assumption is written down before grading starts, because each one alone moves the result by more than 5 percent. The table below shows the spread between the low and high ends of each published assumption, on a $60 hourly input or a fixed OTE or midpoint.

All the ratios are derived from published ranges: hours from contractor calculators, divisors from a 1099 calculator, mixes from sales compensation benchmarks, and zone factors from a worked geographic-differential example. The smallest gap, 50/50 against 53/47 for account executives, is still about 6 percent. If you let a grader choose any one of these inputs, the two figures can drift apart before anyone gets anything wrong.

Here is a starter policy sheet. The values are defensible defaults drawn from the published ranges, not the only correct ones. What matters is that your team picks one value per line and uses it on every posting.

PAY CONVERSION POLICY  (version: ____  adopted: ____)

Hours basis (annualize the hourly or contract rate)
  W2 employee ........ 2,080
  Agency W2 .......... 1,880
  1099 ............... 2,080
  C2C ................ 2,080

Employment-type divisor (applied to the annualized figure)
  W2 employee ........ 1.00
  Agency W2 .......... 1.00
  1099 ............... 1.30
  C2C ................ 1.40

Base share for OTE-only lines (software sales employers only)
  Account Executive .. 50%
  SDR ................ 70%
  Sales Engineer ..... 70%   (alternative published value: 80%)
  Account Manager .... ___   (pick one: 80, 75, 70, 60)
  Other roles ........ no default; variable split fails unless base is stated

Range point ......... midpoint of the range for the pinned zone
Zone source ......... employer's published zone page; else "unpinned"
Open-ended lines .... basis fails; no midpoint
Tolerance ........... two graders within 5% on comparable base

Hours and employment-type adjustments for hourly, 1099, C2C, and agency W2

A rate becomes comparable when you annualize it at the hours the worker is actually paid for, then divide out the costs a W2 employer would normally carry. For a W2 employee that means 2,080 hours with no divisor, because 2,080 is a 40-hour week over 52 weeks and paid time off is already inside it.

Contractors bill only the hours they work. Published billable-hour figures for contractors include 1,600 to 1,800, 1,800, 1,880, and 1,960 after 15 unpaid days. The published 1099 rule is that the rate should be 1.25 to 1.40 times the W2-equivalent salary. For C2C it is 1.3x for a baseline arrangement and 1.4x for high-overhead ones, and other sources go up to 1.5x or 1.54x. The gap covers self-employment tax (around 7.65%), health insurance ($5,000 to $25,000 a year), retirement matching (3 to 6% of salary), and paid time off (10 to 15% of compensation value). One source says plainly that there is no reliable universal percentage. That is the case for a team policy rather than a per-posting judgment.

The same $60 headline rate under the starter policy:

The figures are derived from published contract-to-W2 and C2C calculator conventions. The spread between the top and bottom rows is the reason a batch that ranks on headline rate is already corrupted.

Pick one convention for unpaid time, not two

Two conventions handle a contractor's unpaid time: cut the hours, or fold time off into the divisor. The published divisor components already include paid time off, so if you use 1,800 hours and a 1.30 divisor you count time off twice. The starter policy uses 2,080 plus a divisor for 1099 and C2C, and reduced hours with no divisor for agency W2. Either convention is defensible as long as you only use one.

Agency W2 is the case calculators skip

Agency W2 looks like an employee on paper but behaves like a contractor on time off. No source assigns it a single hours basis. A divisor of 1.1x to 1.2x for agency W2 circulates, but I could not verify it. The closest published claim is that W2 hourly rates run 7 to 10 percent below the C2C rate for the same job. Using 1,880 hours rather than 2,080 moves the result by about 10 percent, so whichever you choose, write it down.

Order of operations

Sources disagree on order. One converter multiplies the rate by billable hours and then subtracts employer-side costs; another applies the adjustment to the hourly rate first. With a pure percentage divisor the order makes no difference. With fixed-dollar costs, such as a health insurance figure, the two orders give different answers. The starter policy avoids this by using a single percentage divisor on the annualized figure.

Splitting OTE into base before you rank

To compare a sales posting with a base band, multiply the OTE by the base share of the role's pay mix and record the mix you used. Before you do that, check whether the law has already done the split for you.

Where the posted range is already base

In California the posted pay scale does not include bonuses, commissions, tips, or other benefits, but commission-paid roles must also post the commission range. New York City's definition of salary does not include other forms of compensation or benefits. In both places a compliant range is stated base, so criterion 4 is N/A. Washington requires a description of any other compensation offered, such as bonuses, commissions, or stock, alongside the range. New York, Vermont, and Maine accept a statement that a job is commission based. I found no jurisdiction that explicitly allows OTE inside the posted range. So a posting from those places that looks like OTE is either noncompliant or mislabelled, and either way the basis is inferred.

Outside those rules, nothing stops a range from carrying total compensation. Payscale's Lulu Seikaly described a posted range of $90,000 to $900,000 that turned out to include total compensation.

Published mixes and how far to trust them

Sources agree on 50/50 for account executives and 70/30 for SDRs. Benchmark data from RepVue put the median SDR base at $60,000 and OTE at $85,000, which works out to a 70.6/29.4 mix. Sources split on sales engineers (70/30 or 80/20) and disagree widely on account managers (80/20, 75/25, 70/30, or 60:40). The blended account executive median from The Bridge Group is 53:47.

Title matching is where the mix step breaks. In Refolk's index of professional profiles, the titles that carry published mixes vary a lot in how clean they are:

There are about 11.3 account executives for every SDR in that index, so the noisiest title is also the one you will meet most often. The account executive sample included employers such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and Ironclad alongside Premier Sotheby's International Realty. A 50/50 software mix applied to a real estate "Account Executive" posting is a false fit. Under the starter policy, a published mix applies only when the employer sells in the market the mix describes. Otherwise criterion 4 fails unless the posting states base.

Realized pay is a different field

OTE assumes 100 percent of quota. A rep on a 50:50 plan who lands at 43 percent of quota earns closer to $145K than the $200K on the offer letter. That matters when you choose between offers, but it is not posted pay, and mixing it into the comparable base breaks the 5 percent tolerance. If you track it, keep it in a separate column.

Pinning the location tier behind "varies by location"

"Varies by location" means the posted range belongs to a pay zone, and your job is to find out which one, usually from the employer's own careers site. If you cannot confirm the zone, mark it unpinned. Do not read the band at its top.

Some employers publish their method. Toast sets the pay zone by office location, or by home zip code for remote roles, across three zones:

Snap says its pay zones may change and asks candidates to confirm their zone with a recruiter. That is why step 1 archives the raw line with its date. Maryland wants a separate range for each location in a multi-location posting, which is the only explicit rule I found that forces the tier into the posting itself.

Zones matter as much as employment type. On a $118,000 midpoint, example factors of 1.20 and 0.92 give $141,600 and $108,560, a 30 percent spread. One compensation guide puts the order plainly: "Internal level comes first; location modifies the range." So apply the zone to the range for the level the posting is hiring at, not to a band you have stretched across levels.

How often multi-location postings say which tier the range represents is not established publicly. Range formats are not standardized either, and postings that give the same lower and upper bound have plateaued at about 15 percent. Expect unpinned to be the common case. Treat it as a known gap rather than a reason to guess.

How to grade one posting, step by step

Grade each posting in the same eight steps, in the same order, with the policy sheet open. Desk estimates put the first seven steps at around ten minutes per posting. No source documents the timing, so measure your own on the first five.

Use the record below once per posting. It is deliberately flat so a whole batch fits in one spreadsheet.

Employer / role / level:
URL:
Captured on:
Raw pay line (verbatim):
Posted location / employment type:

1 Basis ........... [base | OTE | total comp | hourly | contract rate]
                    jurisdiction note: ______   [pass/fail]  [stated/inferred]
2 Period .......... hours used: ______          [pass/fail]  [stated/inferred]
3 Employment type . divisor used: ______        [pass/fail]  [stated/inferred]
4 Variable split .. mix used: ______ or N/A     [pass/fail/N/A]  [stated/inferred]
5 Location tier ... zone: ______ or unpinned    [pass/fail]  [stated/inferred]
6 Source flags .... all fields marked?          [pass/fail]

Comparable base (midpoint, pinned zone): $______
Status: [ranked | provisional]
Grader 2 figure: $______   gap: ____%   [within 5% | regrade]
Realized-pay note (separate, not ranked): ______

Two worked lines show the shape. A C2C posting at $60 an hour becomes $124,800 annualized, divided by 1.40, giving $89,143, with every field stated except the divisor, which is inferred from policy. An account executive posting at a $200K OTE from a software employer outside California and New York City becomes $100K at 50/50, with the mix inferred.

Once both records exist, you can see that the "$200K" posting is about $11K ahead on comparable base, not $111K. And if the C2C posting's zone is unpinned, it ranks provisional anyway.

Ranking is half of the decision. The other half is fit. The matrix below crosses the comparable base with how much of the record the posting actually stated.

This is where Refolk takes friction out of a large batch. Once the top-right quadrant is clear, Refolk tailors your resume to each of those postings and drafts the cover letter from your own history. It also scores how well you fit each role, so you can weigh pay rank against fit before you spend an afternoon on any one application.

How the standard fails: failure modes and false positives

Most batch corruption comes from eight specific errors, each of which produces a confident wrong number rather than an obvious gap. Run this list against any record that surprises you.

1. OTE read as base (criterion 1). False positive: an account executive posting at "$200K" looks like it beats a $150K base band. Check: is the posting governed by California or New York City, where compliant ranges exclude commission? If not, and the role is commission-paid, label it OTE and mark the basis inferred.
2. Contract rate annualized at 2,080 with no divisor (criterion 2). This overstates the rate by 15.6 percent against 1,800 hours. Check: the hours field and divisor field together match the employment type on the policy sheet.
3. Divisor chosen per posting (criterion 3). Graders who pick different points within 1.25 to 1.40 end up 12 percent apart. Check: the divisor in the record equals the policy value, character for character.
4. Mix chosen per posting (criterion 4). Even the gap between 50/50 and 53/47 is about 6 percent, already past tolerance. Check: one mix per role, applied from the policy table.
5. Mix applied by title alone (criterion 4). 9 of 25 sampled account executive profiles in Refolk's index sit outside software selling, real estate among them. Check: the employer's industry matches the market the mix describes.
6. National band read at the top (criterion 5). A seeker in Zone C reads a national band at its ceiling. On Toast's structure, remote roles often fall in Zone C. Check: the zone page, and your office or home zip code against it.
7. Open-ended line treated as a range (criterion 1). "Up to $X" becomes a fake midpoint. In Colorado, New York City, and Washington it is not a compliant range. Check: mark basis fail and rank provisional.
8. Realized pay compared with posted pay. At around 43 percent quota attainment, OTE overstates cash. Check: realized figures live only in their own column.

A pay line you cannot grade is not a low number. It is an unknown, and it ranks separately.

Two limits apply to the standard itself:

• The 5 percent tolerance is a design target, not a measured result. I found no published test of how closely two people agree when converting posted pay. The tolerance comes from the analysis above, which shows that any single unfixed assumption breaks it. To check locally, have two people grade the same ten postings from the archived lines, then count how many land within 5 percent. Where they don't, look for the field where they diverged.
• Missing pay is still common. Roughly a quarter of listings covered by pay transparency laws leave out salary information. Those postings never enter this standard; deciding whether to apply to them is a separate call.

Keeping the standard current across a batch

The standard stays valid as long as the policy sheet is versioned and the inputs that change over time get re-checked at their source rather than remembered. Three kinds of input drift:

• Employer pay zones. Snap says its zones may change. Re-open the zone page before you trust a pinned zone in a posting you captured weeks ago, and keep the original capture date in the record.
• Pay transparency rules. Jurisdictions keep adding and tightening rules. Ontario now caps any posted range at a width of C$50,000. Before grading a batch from a new jurisdiction, check whether its rule defines the range as base and whether it rejects open-ended lines. Then add a line to the policy sheet.
• Contractor cost inputs. The Social Security wage base changes each year, and it feeds the self-employment tax part of any contractor divisor. If your team derives its divisor rather than adopting a published one, re-derive it when the wage base changes, and record the new version on the sheet.

When the policy changes, regrade the batch. A batch graded under two policy versions is two batches, and their figures do not rank against each other. As the batch turns into applications, Refolk keeps one tailored resume and cover letter per posting, so the records you graded and the applications you sent stay matched one to one.