How to read a salary range on a job posting in 2026

A posted salary range is a stored pay band attached to a job and a location, written before anyone opened your application. It is not a prediction of your offer. For a Marketing Manager, BLS's May 2025 estimate puts the median annual wage at $166,790, with the 10th percentile at $90,260 and the 90th at $293,610 (Occupational Outlook Handbook, SOC 11-2021). That spread is wide enough to swallow nearly any range you will see posted, which is why the useful question is not whether the pay is good but which slice of the spread this employer copied, and what they left out of it.

What the two numbers actually are

Inside an applicant tracking system, the range is a field, and the field is filled from a compensation record that existed before the job opened. Workday's admin guide states it directly: "Grades are guidelines used in determining compensation for a worker. Grades also define the standard compensation range for a given job or job level." A grade holds a minimum, a maximum and a midpoint, and the span between them can be broken into three, four or five equal segments — the internal tiers a compensation team uses to decide where inside the band a particular person sits. Workday's own worked example divides a $45,000–$100,000 grade into three segments of $18,333.

Greenhouse differs in the details and matches in the principle. Its pay transparency feature "helps your organization take a step toward pay equity by standardizing how salary ranges display on job posts." A site admin creates a rule and assigns it to an office, where it auto-populates on new job posts; the job admin then selects a currency and enters the range, which may already be pre-filled if the rule is linked to a custom field. So when a Marketing Manager posting shows $130,000 to $165,000, that pair of numbers was typed once, probably months earlier, by someone in compensation who had never heard of you.

How to read this: the lower number is the floor of the band, not the salary of the least experienced person the company would hire. Those are different things, because one band has to hold the person already in the seat as well as the person who might replace them. The upper number is a ceiling for that job profile in that location. Neither number moves because your resume is good.

Where a marketing manager's range sits against the market

Marketing manager annual wages, May 2025

The federal estimate of what people already in the job are paid. A posted range is a slice of this, not a summary of it.

10th percentile		$90,260
Median (50th)		$166,790
Mean		$177,770OEWS national table 1, May 2025
90th percentile		$293,610

The mean sits above the median — $177,770 against $166,790 in the May 2025 OEWS national table — and that gap is the shape of the occupation in a single comparison. BLS defines a percentile wage as "a boundary. For example, an occupational median wage (50th percentile) estimate is the boundary between the highest paid 50 percent and the lowest paid 50 percent." When the average lands above that boundary, a minority of very well paid people are pulling it up. Half of the 395,240 marketing managers counted in the May 2025 OEWS table earn less than $166,790, and the ones at the top are not doing a slightly better version of the same job. They are usually running a bigger function at a bigger company.

The two federal pages disagree on that headcount, and the disagreement is not an error. The Occupational Outlook Handbook puts marketing managers at 421,600 jobs in 2025 and the whole group at 454,800; the OEWS table counts 395,240. Different series, different purposes — use the one the rest of your comparison came from, and say which.

The title next door pays differently, which matters if you are searching on the word rather than on the work:

Source: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, May 2025 wage estimates. What this table does not tell you is what anyone advertised. OEWS counts wages paid to people already employed in the occupation during the survey reference period, so it is a record of what is being earned, not of what is being offered — and the two drift furthest apart for jobs that have repriced in the last year.

One more limit is worth stating before you use these figures as a yardstick. The national percentiles above mix every metro and every employer size into one distribution, so a Marketing Manager in a coastal tech market and one at a regional manufacturer sit in the same column of the same table. OEWS publishes state and metropolitan estimates separately for that reason, and the local file is the better comparison whenever a posting names a city. The national number is a sanity check, not a target.

What is not in the range

Almost certainly: bonus, equity, commission, and the employer's share of benefits. Ashby stores "base compensation, equity, commission, and bonus information for each tier," so a posting can display one of those four numbers while three more sit behind it. The federal figures you compare against have the same hole — BLS says OEWS estimates "represent wages and salaries only, and do not include nonproduction bonuses or employer costs of nonwage benefits." Two incomplete numbers, missing the same pieces, at least compare cleanly.

A posted range and a BLS percentile are not the same object

Both are dollar figures attached to the same job title. They answer different questions.

	The range on the posting	The BLS percentile
Describes	One employer's band for one job profile	Wages actually paid across all employers
Population it covers	Nobody yet — it is a plan	395,240 marketing managers, May 2025
Geography	The office or location on the req	National, unless you pull the state or metro file
Includes bonus or equity	Only if the posting says so	No — wages and salaries only
When it was set	Before the req was published	Survey reference period, May 2025
What it is good for	Deciding whether to apply	Deciding whether the band is normal

Why the same title posts two different ranges

Because the band is attached to a place. Workday's grade profiles exist for exactly this: eligibility rules create "more granular compensation ranges within the grade," so one grade can carry a New York range alongside a default one. Greenhouse rules are assigned per office. Ashby's documentation puts the reasoning in plain words — "Jobs often have different compensation ranges based on criteria such as the market value of the role in the candidate's location."

The practical consequence for a Marketing Manager applying to a remote-eligible req is that the range you see may depend on the location you pick in the form, and may change once you pick it. If a posting lists two or three ranges by region, that is not a company hedging its bets. That is one grade with three grade profiles, rendered honestly, and it is more information than a single averaged number would have given you.

Does the range have to be real?

In New York State, yes, within limits. The pay transparency requirement in New York Labor Law took effect on 17 September 2023 and covers employers with four or more employees, and the state Department of Labor's guidance is specific about the standard: the posted figures "must be the minimum and maximum annual salary, piece rate or hourly rate that you, as the employer, believe in good faith to be accurate when the ad is posted," where a good faith range means "the range of pay you legitimately believe you are willing to pay at the time of the job opportunity posting."

Two details in that guidance change how you read a posting, whether or not the employer is in New York. The first is what the law deliberately keeps out. The Department of Labor says the range "should not include other forms of compensation or benefits connected to an opportunity, such as health, life or other employer provided insurance; paid or unpaid time off … severance pay; overtime pay; or other forms of compensation such as commissions, tips, bonuses, stock or the value of employer provided meals or lodging." So a complying New York posting shows base pay by design rather than by omission — the same boundary BLS draws around its wage estimates, which is why the two numbers compare cleanly.

The second is reach. The requirement follows the reporting line, not the desk: it covers a job performed outside New York that "reports to a supervisor, office, or other work site in the state of New York," remote positions included. A Marketing Manager role advertised as remote from anywhere, reporting into a New York head of marketing, carries a posted range for that reason and not because the company chose to volunteer one.

What this does not tell you: good faith is a standard for the advertisement, not a promise about the offer, and nothing in it obliges an employer to reach the top of the band for you. Other states set their own thresholds and their own rules; the language above is New York's.

When the range is unusually wide

A Marketing Manager posting that reads $110,000 to $210,000 is not being generous. A span that crosses the national median usually means the req covers two levels — the company will hire either a manager or a senior manager, and the grade attached to the offer is chosen after the interviews decide which one you are. Ranges like that are a question, not a promise, and the answer arrives with the level.

The tell is worth learning because it changes what you ask for. If the width is two levels, arguing about where you land inside the band is the wrong argument; the number follows the title. Ask which level the req is scoped for, and whether both are still open. A recruiter will usually answer that plainly, because it is the thing they are trying to work out too.

What to do when there is no range at all

Plenty of postings still carry no number, and the reason is often mechanical rather than evasive. In Greenhouse a pay transparency rule pre-populates on a job post only when a site admin has configured it to auto-fill for that office. Otherwise the job admin picks the rule from a list, selects a currency and types the range in — and a job admin can also remove a rule that does not apply. A req in an office no rule covers shows nothing until someone chooses to put a number there.

That leaves you doing the work the posting skipped. For a Marketing Manager, the honest substitute is the percentile spread — $90,260 at the 10th, $166,790 at the median, $293,610 at the 90th in May 2025 — narrowed by whatever you know about the employer's size and metro, since OEWS publishes state and metropolitan files as well as the national one. Write down the number you would accept before you open the form, because the application will ask for it. The "desired salary" field is not the place to work out your position for the first time.

Where in the band does the offer land?

Here is the position, and plenty of career advice disagrees with it: the midpoint is the number the band was built around, and the top quartile is somewhere you get paid to be, not somewhere you negotiate your way into. The mechanism is in Workday's own description of a grade — a minimum, a maximum, a midpoint, and a split into three, four or five equal segments. Those segments exist to place people. Someone sitting in the top one is usually a long-tenured employee who arrived there through several years of increases inside the same band, not a new hire who asked well.

That is not the same as saying the number is fixed. It means the movement available to you generally happens within a segment rather than across the whole band, and that a request anchored a little above the midpoint reads as informed while a request at the ceiling reads as a misunderstanding of what a ceiling is. If you want the top of a Marketing Manager band, the argument has to be that you should be hired at the level above the one posted. That is a conversation about the job profile, and it has to happen before the offer is drafted, because at that point the grade has already been chosen.

How to place a posted range in five minutes

Checking a range before you spend an hour on the application

1. 1
   Name the occupation

   Find the SOC code the work matches, not the title on the posting. Marketing Manager is 11-2021; a promotions-heavy version of the same job may be 11-2011, whose May 2025 median was $133,660.

2. 2
   Pull the percentiles

   Read the 10th, the median and the 90th from the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook page for that occupation, and note the date of the estimate.

3. 3
   Lay the range over them

   A band running from below the 10th percentile to near the median is an early-career or low-wage-metro band. One that starts above the median is a senior band wearing a junior title.

4. 4
   Ask what is inside it

   Base only, or base plus bonus and equity? Ashby and Greenhouse both store those components separately, so a posting may show one and hold four.

5. 5
   Ask which location it is for

   If the role is remote, ask which grade profile applies to you before the interviews, not after the offer arrives.

Five minutes of this beats an hour of comparing crowd-sourced salary sites, because every number in it is dated and traceable to the page it came from. It will not tell you what this company will offer you, specifically. Nothing public will, and any tool that claims otherwise is modelling, not reporting.

If you are applying for this role

Three specifics for a Marketing Manager search. First, search the adjacent titles too: O*NET lists Advertising and Promotions Managers (11-2011.00), Sales Managers (11-2022.00), Public Relations Managers (11-2032.00) and Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists (13-1161.00) as related occupations, and employers use all of them for overlapping work at genuinely different pay. Second, expect the middle of a posted band, and check that the midpoint clears your number before the first call — the market context is a May 2025 median of $166,790 and a 10th-to-90th spread of $90,260 to $293,610, inside an occupation group BLS sizes at 454,800 positions with about 36,300 openings projected each year through 2035. Third, ask one question in the screening call: is this range base salary only, and which location is it set for? The answer takes ten seconds and decides whether the rest of the process is worth your time.

If reading the ranges is the part worth your attention and retyping the same details into forms is the part that is not, HeroApply fills the application from your saved resume, so the hours go to the postings you have actually read.