How much to counter offer on a salary: picking the one number

The situation. The offer is in hand, you’ve decided to counter, and you may even have the counter email drafted. What’s stopping you is the blank in the middle of it: the number itself. Too low and the counter spends your one move on almost nothing; too high and you worry it strains the goodwill you built through the process. The email and the number are two separate decisions - the email is already scripted; this guide is how you pick what goes in it.

What’s actually happening. Initial offers commonly land with room above them, because recruiters typically expect a counter and budget for one. So the question is rarely whether there’s room; it’s how much of it your number can credibly claim. That’s decided by two things you can work out on paper before you say anything: where the offer sits inside your researched range, and how much headroom your counter needs so the close lands on your real target.

Read the offer against your range first. Your researched range is the realistic market band for your role, level, and location: comp data, trusted peers, numbers recruiters have quoted you. Place the offer inside it before choosing anything.

• Bottom third of the band. The most room. Your counter can reach for the top of the researched range and stay defensible the whole way up.
• Mid-band. There’s still room, but the ceiling is closer. The counter stays inside the band, typically at or just under its top.
• At or near your researched ceiling. A large base counter stops being defensible here; the honest counter is small, and the conversation often moves to the other parts of the package instead.
• Below the band entirely. That’s a lowball, and it’s a different situation with its own script.

The headroom mechanics. Negotiations typically settle between the two numbers on the table. Which means: if you counter with the number you’d actually sign at, a settle-in-the-middle close lands below it. The counter has to open above your real target so the closing motion falls onto it, not under it. The build order: pick your sign number (the figure you’d genuinely accept tomorrow), add roughly 10 to 15 percent, then check the result against your researched ceiling. A counter above your own research is a counter you can’t explain, and the explanation is what makes it a position instead of a wish.

A worked example, every step shown. All numbers hypothetical. Say your research puts the realistic band for the role at $150,000 to $180,000, and the offer arrives at $156,000 - the bottom third, so there’s real room. The number you’d genuinely sign at is $170,000. Add headroom: $170,000 plus ten percent is $187,000, but that’s above your own researched ceiling, so it’s a number you couldn’t defend if asked. Cap it at the top of the band: the counter is $180,000. Now look at the geometry you’ve built. They said $156,000, you’ll say $180,000, and the midpoint of those two numbers is $168,000 - so a close anywhere from the midpoint upward lands on or near your $170,000. If they meet the full number, better still. That’s exactly why the counter wasn’t $170,000.

What to say, word for word. One sentence carries the number and its reason, then stops:

“Based on my research for this role, level, and location, and the scope we discussed through the process, I was expecting something closer to [YOUR COUNTER] - and at that level, I’d be ready to say yes.”

In the worked example, the blank reads $180,000. Notice what the sentence does: it names one number, attaches the reason it is that number (research plus scope, not need or hope), and closes with what the number buys them - a yes. The same sentence works spoken on the call or dropped into the gap paragraph of the counter email. What follows the sentence, in either medium, is silence.

The mistakes that cost the most: countering with a range (a range is commonly heard as its bottom, so the top of it does no work) · countering a bare number with no stated reason (research plus scope make it a position; without them it reads as a wish, and wishes are easier to decline) · countering a second time after they meet your number (your sentence named the yes condition - when they meet it, that is the deal, and reopening it spends the credibility that made the first number worth meeting).