How to Increase Your Salary, and three uncomfortable truths about why most professionals cannot

How to Increase Your Salary: Effective Strategies for 2025

In today’s economic climate, marked by inflation and evolving job markets, understanding how to effectively advocate for a salary increase is crucial.

Here’s the bottom line:

If you want to increase your salary, you need to be strategic, bold, and unapologetically self-serving. Corporations are designed to pay you as little as possible. If left unchecked, they’d have you working for free. Your task is to make them pay – and pay big.

Here’s how to do it.

Leverage Is Everything

You only get paid what you can get away with making them pay, period.

In this context, leverage is the key to salary negotiations. Without leverage, you’re at the mercy of the company’s whims. Here’s how to build and use leverage effectively.

Mainstream Techniques

  1. Gain More Qualifications: The more qualifications you have, the harder it is for them to justify paying you less. It also makes you more competitive, because it makes you more employable. Consider pursuing additional certifications, attending workshops, or obtaining advanced degrees relevant to your field. (You also want to explore what “qualifications” really are – as they are not just credentials, experience or skills.)
  2. Maintain a Consistent Performance: Always deliver. Consistency is key. Consistent high performance builds a track record that’s hard to ignore. This can be particularly persuasive during performance reviews or salary negotiations.
  3. Take More Responsibilities: Show you can handle more. This makes a strong case for why you deserve more money, as you’re effectively increasing your value to the company.
  4. Get an Outstanding Performance Review: This becomes documented proof of your value. If it is documented, you can use it as leverage. Outstanding performance reviews are powerful tools in salary negotiations – sure, they may be subjective and imperfect, but they can still be used to your advantage.
  5. Seek Regular Feedback: Use feedback to improve and align your performance with your employer’s expectations. But don’t just stop there… After incorporating their feedback, remind your boss of your continuous progress to strengthen your case for higher pay.
  6. Understand Your Role: Know exactly how your work impacts the company’s bottom line. Use this in negotiations. Fully understanding the scope and impact of your role within the company can help you better articulate your value during salary negotiations.
  7. Be Likable: Office politics matter. And they matter A LOT. Being on good terms with decision-makers can sway things in your favor. Keep in mind, being likable doesn’t mean compromising your professionalism or sucking up, it can boil down to simply being a decent human being.
  8. Ask for It: Don’t wait for a salary increase to be offered. Proactively ask for it. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. Be direct and assertive when requesting a raise, but also remain within the bounds of the corporate game – there’s a big list of “dos and don’ts” when it comes to talking about money. Learn the game.

Next Level Techniques

  1. Job Hopping: Companies often pay more for new talent than existing employees. Use this to your advantage. (By the way, this isn’t some conspiracy. It happens because, typically, hiring budgets are larger than retention budgets, and inflation, if you haven’t noticed, is a thing – raises rarely keep up with inflation, but hiring has to.)
  2. Create a Rival Offer: Get a job offer from another company and use it as leverage. Even if you don’t intend to leave, it shows your value. You must be extra tactful and careful when playing the rival offer game and informing your employer about your options – if it appears like bullying or extortion, you can lose your job. (This is not legal advice, but… you should know that extortion also happens to be illegal.)
  3. Develop a Personal Brand: Position yourself as an indispensable expert in your field. Campaign externally as well as internally within your organization to boost your profile. High visibility often results in higher pay.
  4. Propose New Initiatives: Identify new revenue streams or cost-saving measures and offer to lead them. If you are making it rain, it’s hard for the company to say no to your raise requests.
  5. Negotiate Beyond Your Boss: Find allies higher up in the company who see your value. They can advocate for your raise, or even lead to higher paying as well as higher title positions.
  6. Consulting Gig: Consider becoming a consultant for your company. Charge more and gain control over your rates and work. 
  7. Play the Infinite Game: Don’t limit yourself to the confines of your current role. Think bigger and create new opportunities. Simon Sinek‘s explanation of finite and infinite games is crucial in understanding this concept: In finite games, you compete directly with peers for limited resources or positions, often resulting in a zero-sum outcome. In contrast, infinite game players focus on long-term growth and creating new opportunities. In infinite games, everyone can win.

The Concept of Power

We cannot do the concept of increasing your salary justice without talking about power…

Power in the workplace isn’t about how well you do your job. It’s about how well you can influence the system to your advantage.

Power comes from:

  • Authority vested in you (i.e. through ownership of company or intervention of the board or shareholders)
  • Influence (i.e. through your relationships and ability to exert influence on minds, especially the minds of those who have authority)
  • Creation of value (i.e. you’re one of the few that makes profit happen)
  • Control of value (i.e. without you, profit doesn’t happen, even if you don’t directly create the value yourself)

Here are three inconvenient truths about power and income related to increasing your salary:

Truth #1: Corporations Want to Pay as Little as Possible

Understand that corporations are not your friends. Their goal is to maximize profits (also known as the Friedman doctrine), and this maximization can often be at your expense.

Remember: While the ideal employment contract is a win-win arrangement, it would be foolish to assume that there isn’t any antagonism between employer and employee. Otherwise, movements like socialism and communism wouldn’t have emerged.

You need to recognize this fact and act accordingly. It is your job and your job alone to advocate for your interest. And you must do so in an environment where the entire legal an operational machinery of a corporation is working against you.

Truth #2: You Are Paid for Who You Are, Not What You Do

You are not entitled to your income just because you have your engineering degree, or your law degree, or your 10 years of experience doing something, or whatever certificate you happen to have…

In human societies, people are compensated far more for who they are than for what they do. And if you doubt this proposition, just observe the career trajectory of any A-list celebrity.

While this may appear irrational, or seem like it goes against the tenets of meritocracy, there are evolutionary and psychological forces that tilt the equation of compensation towards reputation over value. Humans are social creatures, and payment is a social function.

High earners get paid for their perceived value, not just their output. Build a personal brand, create a track record of success, and make sure everyone knows about it.

Truth #3: Upgrading Your Pay Isn’t About Getting Better at Your Job

There is little correlation between you being a good “doer of your thing” and you making seven figures or more. Just think about all the starving artists in history, whose works can now sell for hundreds of millions of dollars.

They were great at their art. And they were also penniless!

This should serve as a crucial reminder that being excellent at your job isn’t enough. To earn a high salary, you also need to promote yourself, network strategically, and position yourself as a high-value asset.

Your technical skills alone, neither will your track record of making it rain, be enough. They won’t get you to the top pay brackets.

Understanding power will.

Conclusion

Increasing your salary isn’t about waiting for the company to recognize your worth.

It’s about taking bold, strategic actions to make them pay you what you deserve.

You need to use leverage, understand the power dynamics at play, and be unapologetic in your pursuit of higher pay.

It’s nothing personal, it’s business. The real players will appreciate your candor, whereas those who are not in the game – who cares what they think!

You aren’t working out of the goodness of your heart – it’s not charity, it’s a job. If you weren’t paid for your work, you’d likely have many better things to do. Don’t lose sight of this fact, and advocate for your self-interest.

Be savvy. Be professional. And fight for the highest pay for your time.

For more in-depth strategies and personalized guidance, explore our courses and events designed to help professionals maximize their earning potential.