How do you determine fair salaries for remote team members across different regions?

[John]

I’ve been using Atlassian tools (mainly Jira and Confluence) to manage a fully remote e-commerce and development team. While these tools help with productivity and project tracking, I’m struggling with setting fair and competitive salaries for team members in different locations — especially since cost of living and market rates vary so much between regions.

I know some companies use broad “cost of living” multipliers, but that can be tricky to get right. Others just pay the same rate regardless of location, but that sometimes makes it harder to hire in higher-cost areas.

I recently came across SalaryPediaUSA.com, which has salary benchmarks for a wide variety of roles, including software developers, project managers, and e-commerce specialists. It’s been helpful for seeing what’s competitive in the U.S., but I’d like to hear how others handle global compensation strategies while keeping things fair and sustainable.

My questions for the community:

1. How do you set salary bands for different countries or states while managing a distributed team?

2. Do you base pay purely on skill and role, or also factor in location-based adjustments?

3. Has anyone here used market benchmarking tools or data sources alongside Atlassian products to guide hiring decisions?

[Mohsin Shaikh]

Hello @John

Hope you are doing well.

How Distributed Companies Structure Pay

1. Location-Based Salary Bands (with Open Calculators)

• It's important to use a “home-based” compensation approach, meaning pay is tied to where the employee lives, not a central office. Maintain salary bands for each job family, level, and location, and review these annually using global market data. 

• GitLab: GitLab is famous for its radical transparency. Their public compensation calculator lets anyone see how pay is determined by role, region, and seniority. Their entire employee handbook is open source, including detailed sections on compensation philosophy and pay equity.

• Remote.com: Remote, a global HR platform, also shares insights on how they structure pay for distributed teams, focusing on compliance and fairness across 150+ countries.

2. Open-Source and Community Compensation Tools

• GitHub - remoteintech/remote-jobs: This GitHub - remoteintech/remote-jobs: A list of semi to fully remote-friendly companies (jobs) in tech. lists remote-friendly companies and often links to their public compensation philosophies or calculators. It’s a great resource for seeing how a variety of tech companies approach distributed pay.

Practical Steps for You

• Explore open calculators: Try out GitLab’s compensation calculator methodology for inspiration.

• Document your own approach: Use Confluence or a similar tool to clearly document your compensation philosophy, salary bands, and adjustment logic—transparency builds trust.

• Benchmark with multiple sources: Supplement US-centric tools like SalaryPediaUSA with global data from platforms like Radford, Pave, or even open-source repositories on GitHub.

• Stay flexible and review regularly: Distributed companies update their bands annually (or more often) to keep up with market shifts and ensure fairness.

I hope this information helps.

Best Regards,

Mohsin