Pay bands that look even until you split by hire year

Compensation committees like a chart that shows most people sitting inside the band. That chart is easy to draw and easy to misuse. People hired in 2018 under a freeze can sit at the bottom of the same band as people hired last spring at a market rate the handbook never quite admitted.

A hire-year split is a blunt instrument and still one of the more useful pages we produce. It does not prove unfairness. It shows whether “the band” is one policy or two eras glued together. Gender splits, when the field is populated, belong on a separate page with the missing-data count in the title — not in a footnote.

Allowances confuse Georgian packs: transport, language, and role supplements that are guaranteed in practice but excluded from “base” in the file. We ask which total the committee will discuss, then print that word on every axis. Mixing base in one chart and total in the next is how a calm meeting becomes an accusation.

If you do not have hire dates, say so. We will not infer them from a person ID sequence.