Does the raise keep them at market?
A percentage on its own says nothing. Enter the role, market, current package, and the increase you are testing, and see the band position before and after, with a verdict on whether the role stays at market or drifts below the median. Free, no signup.
What you get
- Position before and after the raiseThe package's percentile on the verified band today, and where the proposed increase moves it.
- A verdict on market positionWhether the raise keeps the role at or above the market median, or leaves it drifting below.
- The gap to the median when one remainsIf the proposed increase still undershoots the median, the tool shows the percentage that reaches it.
Free, no signup. Built on verified primary sources, refreshed quarterly; no band publishes on fewer than three.
Review the position, not the percentage
Salary reviews fail quietly. Nobody resigns over a single review cycle; they resign two years later, when three modest increases have compounded into a package sitting a quartile below the market and a recruiter does the arithmetic for them. The percentage that caused it looked reasonable every single year. That is the trap of reviewing increments instead of positions: the number under review is the raise, but the thing the market sees is the resulting package.
The discipline is to price the outcome. Before approving an increase, position the current package on the verified band for the role and market, apply the proposed percentage, and look at where it lands. A raise that keeps the role at or above the band’s median is doing its job whatever the percentage. A raise that still leaves the package below the median is a decision to stay exposed, which can be a deliberate call for a role you can refill easily, but should never be an accident of a uniform increase matrix.
The calculator also names the case the review cycle cannot fix. When a package sits below the bottom of its band even after the proposed raise, incremental percentages will not close the gap before the market does. The honest verdict there is re-banding: one deliberate reset to a defensible point on the band, priced as a retention decision rather than smuggled through as an oversized increment.
Reviews interact with the other comp moments. If a competing offer has already landed, the counter-offer calculator prices that conversation against the same band, and when the right answer to a review is a step up rather than a raise, the promotion salary calculator prices the package at the new level instead.
When the review covers a whole team rather than one role, the GCC Pay Report puts every published band across 12 sectors and both markets in one licensed document, and for any role we do not publish yet, a Custom Band Request builds a verified band in 5 business days.
Common questions
Test it against the market band, not last year's increase. A raise is enough when it holds or improves the role's position on the verified band for its market. The calculator positions the package before and after the proposed percentage and tells you whether the result sits at or above the market median, or still leaves the role below it with the gap quantified.
Regional norms cluster in the low-to-mid single digits, but the norm is the wrong anchor. The same 5 percent keeps one role comfortably at market and leaves another drifting, because what matters is where the package starts on its band and how fast the band itself is moving. Pricing the outcome, the position after the raise, is what the review is for.
It means the role is priced off-market and the review cycle is the wrong instrument. Incremental percentages compound too slowly to close a band-level gap, so the tool flags it as a re-banding case: reset the package to a defensible point on the band once, rather than losing the seat to a competing offer and re-hiring at market anyway.
Uniform percentages preserve existing gaps: roles below the median stay below it, roles above it drift further above. A market-anchored review spends the same budget unevenly on purpose, correcting the exposed packages and holding the well-positioned ones, so the whole team converges on the band instead of diverging from it.
The Tenure Pay Index: verified primary sources across 12 sectors in UAE and Saudi, refreshed quarterly. No band publishes on fewer than three sources, and the methodology is public end to end at /methodology.
Yes. Pick the market, enter the current monthly package in AED, SAR, or USD and the proposed percentage, and the tool prices the outcome against that market's verified band for the role and level.
One role per check here. The review cycle prices all of them.
Tenure Comp Intelligence positions your whole roster against verified bands across 12 sectors in UAE and Saudi, so review season starts from the market, not from last year’s matrix.