How to Negotiate Your Salary, Ask for a Raise, and Ask for a Promotion

The Method: Benchmark, One Number, One Ask

1. Find a benchmark you can show someone

The best evidence is current job adverts for comparable roles in your area that publish a salary range. Collect five or more, note the range in each, and look at where most of them sit. Salary sites that pool self-reported pay are useful for a sense of direction, but a hiring manager will take an advert for the same job more seriously than a figure from a website.

National statistics give context, not a target. The Office for National Statistics' Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings 2025 puts median gross annual earnings for full-time employees at £39,039 in April 2025 (provisional figures). That tells you whether a role pays above or below the typical full-time job in the UK. It does not tell you what this role pays in Leeds.

Colleagues are the other source, and the law protects that conversation in one important case. Section 77 of the Equality Act 2010 makes a contract term that stops you discussing pay unenforceable when the discussion is for finding out whether pay is connected to a protected characteristic, such as sex or race. Asking, telling and receiving that information are all protected acts, so you cannot lawfully be victimised for them. Outside that purpose, the section does not override a confidentiality clause.

2. Choose one number, and a walk-away figure

Your ask is the highest figure your evidence and experience can defend out loud. Your walk-away figure is the lowest you would accept, and nobody else hears it. I do not use a fixed rule such as "add 10 to 15 percent", because the gap between the offer and the market is different every time: sometimes 5% is a stretch and sometimes 15% is simply the going rate.

Give a single number, not a range. Say "between £45,000 and £50,000" and the conversation starts at £45,000. If you truly cannot avoid a range, make the bottom of it a number you would be pleased with.

3. Ask once, with your reasons

Start with the part that is true and helps you: you want the job. Then the number, then no more than two reasons, then a question. Stop there. A long justification sounds like you expect to be refused.

Assume the number is negotiable unless you are told otherwise. In a field experiment published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Andreas Leibbrandt and John List advertised real administrative assistant jobs in nine US cities and studied how nearly 2,500 applicants responded. When the advert said nothing about negotiation, men were more likely than women to start one. When it said explicitly that wages were negotiable, that gender difference disappeared and even reversed.

Who should name a number first?

My position: before an offer exists, let the employer go first. If a recruiter asks for your expectations at the screening stage, ask for the budgeted range: "I'd like to understand the full scope of the role before landing on a number. What's the budgeted range?" If a form or a recruiter insists, give one figure from your research, at the top of what it supports, and do not volunteer your current salary: it describes your last employer's budget, not this job. Once you hold an offer, the employer has named its number and the rest of this method applies.

Worked Example: Countering a £42,000 Offer

This is an invented example. The people, company and advert figures are made up; the ONS figure is real. Aisha is a marketing manager earning £40,500. After two interviews, a Manchester retailer sends her a written offer for its Marketing Manager role at £42,000, with 25 days' holiday and hybrid working.

1. Benchmark. She finds six current adverts for marketing manager roles in Greater Manchester at similar-sized companies. Their ranges run from £40,000–£45,000 at the bottom to £46,000–£52,000 at the top, and four of the six have midpoints between £45,000 and £47,000.
2. Context. The ONS full-time median of £39,039 confirms the role pays above the typical UK job, which she expected. It plays no part in her number.
3. Ask. £47,000: the top of where most adverts sit, justified because she has run a £300,000 annual budget and managed two people, which the job description lists as desirable rather than essential. That is 11.9% above the offer.
4. Walk-away. £44,000. Below that, the move is not worth leaving a job she does not dislike.

She thanks the recruiter on the phone the day the offer arrives, says she will reply in writing by Thursday, and sends this on Wednesday:

Jo replies two days later: the band for the role tops out at £45,000, and the hiring manager can go to the top of it. That is above Aisha's walk-away figure, so she has a decision rather than a failed negotiation. She makes one more ask, on something that costs the employer nothing today:

The employer agrees. Aisha asks for the revised offer in writing and accepts only when it arrives with the £45,000 and the six-month review in it. The result is £3,000 more than the first offer, 7.1%, plus a dated chance to close the rest of the gap. How to respond to a job offer email has wording for the acceptance itself.

Two details made it work. The email gave the employer something to take to whoever approves pay: adverts and duties, not a feeling. And the second ask was small and specific, which made it easy to say yes to.

At the Offer Stage

This is where you have the most bargaining power. The employer has chosen you and does not want to restart the process. Negotiate after the offer is in writing and before you say yes; once you have accepted, there is nothing left to discuss. I would ask for a day or two to consider an offer even if you already know your answer.

If the base salary really is fixed, move to the parts of the package that do not come out of the same budget line: a written review at six months, a signing bonus, extra holiday, or a start date that lets you take a break between jobs. Flexible working is worth agreeing in the offer. GOV.UK says employees can request flexible working, such as changes to their hours, start and finish times, days or place of work, from their first day in a job, but a request is only a request. An arrangement already written into your contract is not.

The pushback you will hear, and the replies I would use:

If your current employer makes a counter-offer when you resign, apply the same test you used on the new offer: whether more money fixes the reason you started looking. If the reason was the work, the team or your prospects, the counter-offer only delays the resignation. Your notice period still runs either way; the guide to UK notice periods covers the dates. For a Swiss offer, the average salary in Switzerland guide shows how to benchmark against the official figures there.

Asking for a Raise

Inside a job, your bargaining power is weaker: there is no other candidate your employer is afraid of losing, only you. That makes the benchmark and the evidence carry more of the weight, and timing matters more than it does with an offer.

Timing. I would ask a few weeks before your annual review rather than in it, while the budget for next year is still being decided. A delivered project or a clear jump in responsibility is a good trigger. During a hiring freeze or a redundancy process is a poor one.

Evidence. Three things. The market: the same advert benchmark as above, for your role at your level. What you delivered in the last twelve months, with numbers. And what grew: people you now manage, a vacancy you have been covering, work that belongs to the grade above. Pay drift counts too. In the ONS 2025 survey, median weekly earnings for full-time employees rose 5.3% in the year to April 2025, or 1.1% after inflation. If your pay has not moved for two years, that is part of your case.

One thing that is not a raise: if you are paid at or near the legal minimum, the April increase is the law, not your employer's generosity. GOV.UK gives the National Living Wage from April 2026 as £12.71 an hour for workers aged 21 and over, up from £12.21. Ask for your raise on top of it.

The conversation. Ask for a meeting about pay by name, so your manager can find out what is possible before you sit down. Then:

Then stop talking. What you will usually hear, and what I would say back:

• "There's no budget right now." Ask for a date to revisit it and what you need to show by then, and confirm both in an email afterwards.
• "Everyone gets the same percentage." Ask whether exceptions exist and who approves them, and offer to put your case in writing for that person.
• A flat no. Ask plainly whether it is a budget issue or a performance issue. The answer tells you whether next year will be different.

If it is budget, and the answer is the same a year later, the raise you are looking for is probably at another employer. The job search strategy guide is the next step, and the offer you get from it is where the method above has the most force.

Asking for a Promotion

The benchmark here is not an advert but the description of the level you want. Get it from HR or your manager, and mark each requirement: already doing it (with an example), partly, or not yet. Name the gaps yourself before anyone else does. A case that admits one gap and shows a plan for it is more credible than one that claims a perfect match.

Ask for the title and the pay in the same conversation. I would not accept a new title with a promise to "look at salary later": the title is the easy part to give and the pay is the part you are asking for. If they cannot move pay now, get the date and the figure in writing.

If the answer is "not yet", turn it into criteria and a date: what exactly has to be true, and when you will review it together. Send an email the same day that restates both. If the date passes and the criteria are met without a promotion, you have your answer about this employer.

Sources

• ONS: Employee earnings in the UK, 2025 (Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, provisional)
• Equality Act 2010, section 77 (discussions about pay)
• GOV.UK: National Minimum Wage and National Living Wage rates
• GOV.UK: Flexible working
• NBER Digest: Do Women Avoid Salary Negotiations? (Leibbrandt and List, Working Paper 18511)