How to Ask for a Raise: What to Say, and What to Send First

If you have been meaning to ask for a raise for a while and keep not doing it, the thing in your way is probably not courage. It is usually that you do not know what the first move is, and "schedule a conversation with your manager about money" is a large and shapeless thing to put on a Tuesday.

So let's make it small. The first move is an email, and it is three sentences long.

Say you have been in your role a couple of years and you have taken on a good deal more than you started with. You have decided you are going to raise it this quarter. Every time you think about how to begin, you imagine the actual conversation, you picture the pause after you say a number, and you decide to deal with it next month. That loop is where most raises go to die, and it breaks the moment there is something concrete to do instead.

What should you do first when you want to ask for a raise?

Send a short email asking for a meeting about your compensation, and send it before you have everything worked out. The email is not the ask, it is only the appointment, and separating those two things is the single most useful move in this whole process.

Here is why it helps so much. If you wait until you feel ready, you will keep finding more preparation to do, because preparing is comfortable and asking is not. If the meeting is in the diary for next Thursday, the preparation becomes finite and it gets done. You have also removed the hardest part of the live conversation, which is the opening, because your manager already knows what the meeting is about and nobody has to raise the subject from a standing start.

Something like this is enough.

Subject: Time to discuss my compensation

Hi [name],

I would like to find half an hour in the next couple of weeks to talk about my compensation. My
role has changed quite a bit over the past [time period] and I would like us to look at where it
now sits.

Let me know what works and I will send an invitation.

Thanks,
[your name]

Three things that email does deliberately. It names the subject, so there is no ambiguity and no awkward reveal. It gives a reason that is about the work rather than about your feelings or your rent. And it asks to look at the question together, which is a different proposition from announcing that you want more money.

What do you need to prepare before the meeting?

Two things, and you can do both in an afternoon. A list of what you have done with results attached, and a number with a reason behind it.

The list. Write five or six specific items, each one saying what the situation was, what you did, and what changed. Numbers where numbers exist and honest estimates where they do not. If you have not done this before, the fastest way in is to ask yourself what would have gone wrong if you had not been there, where you helped the business make or save money, and what would fall through the cracks if you stopped paying attention to it. Those three questions find much more than trying to remember your achievements does.

The number. You need a figure and a reason that is not "I would like more." The reason should come from the market, so look at live job advertisements for the work you actually do rather than for your job title, and check more than one salary source because they disagree with each other. If you know people in similar roles elsewhere, ask about ranges rather than about their individual pay, which is a much easier question for anyone to answer.

Then decide three numbers before you walk in. What you are going to ask for, what you would accept, and what would make you start looking elsewhere. You do not say the second or third out loud. You just need to know them, because the alternative is doing that arithmetic in the room while someone is looking at you.

Why does asking feel riskier than it should?

Because for many women it is riskier, and that is a documented finding rather than a feeling you need to talk yourself out of.

In a set of experiments published in 2007, Hannah Riley Bowles, Linda Babcock and Lei Lai had people evaluate written and filmed accounts of job candidates. When no pay request was involved, there was no difference in how men and women were rated. When candidates asked for higher compensation, the women were rated lower than the men who asked in the same way, and evaluators reported being less willing to work with a woman who had asked, with no equivalent effect for men. What the evaluators said about those women was that they seemed less nice.

I want to be careful about what that does and does not tell you. It was an experiment, with people rating descriptions of candidates, so it is strong evidence that the effect exists and it is not a prediction about your particular manager, who may be perfectly reasonable. But it does mean something useful. If asking has felt disproportionately uncomfortable to you, you have been reading a real feature of the situation rather than imagining one, and the answer is not to care less about it.

The answer is in how you ask, which is what the rest of this is about. An evidence-led request framed around the work is much harder to receive as a personal demand than a confident assertion that you deserve more, and that is not a trick. It is just a more accurate description of what you are actually doing.

What do you say in the conversation?

Open with the work, give the evidence, say the number, and then stop talking.

That last part is the one people get wrong, so take it literally. When you have said your number, stop. The silence that follows will feel much longer than it is, and the urge to fill it by softening what you just said is very strong. Resist it, because everything you add after the number makes the number smaller. "I was hoping for sixty-eight" followed by "but obviously I understand if that is difficult" has just opened a negotiation against yourself.

A shape that works:

"Thanks for making the time. I wanted to talk about my compensation, because my role has changed quite a lot since it was set up. [Two or three specifics with results.] Looking at what the market pays for this work now, I think the right number is [X]. I would like to understand how you see it."

Then let them answer.

Notice what that does not contain. No apology, no reference to your expenses or your rent, no comparison to a colleague, and no threat. Your personal costs are not an argument, because your employer is not pricing your life, they are pricing the work. A colleague's pay is not an argument either, and raising it usually turns the conversation into a discussion about them instead of you.

How do you answer the questions they will ask?

There are two that come up almost every time, and both are easier with a prepared answer.

"What number were you thinking?" Give a range rather than a single figure, with your actual target at the bottom of it rather than in the middle. People tend to hear the lower end, so if you say sixty-five to seventy expecting to land in the middle, you will usually be offered sixty-five. If your target is seventy, the range starts at seventy.

"What are you earning now?" or, if this is a new role, "what is your current salary?" You can turn this around politely. Something like "before I give you a number, could you tell me the range you have budgeted for this?" works, and it is a normal thing to ask. Where you have to answer, give your number and immediately attach what you are looking for, so the conversation moves forward rather than anchoring on the old figure.

And if the answer is no, which it sometimes is, the question to ask is not whether they are sure. It is "what would need to be true for this to change, and when should we look at it again?" That turns a closed door into a date, and it gives you something to hold them to. If the answer to that is vague every time you ask it, you have learned something important about where you work.

What does not asking actually cost you?

More than the monthly difference, and it does not stay the same size.

Future raises are generally worked out as a percentage of what you already earn, so a base that is too low makes every increase on top of it smaller. Pension and retirement contributions are usually a percentage of salary, so a low base quietly reduces those as well. And when you move jobs, the offer you get is often anchored to what you currently make, which means the number you are on now follows you into the next place.

So the gap you are looking at today is the smallest version of that gap you will ever see. The cost of putting it off for another year is not one year of the difference. It is one year of the difference plus a permanently lower base for everything that compounds on top of it.

The quieter cost is what it does to how you feel about a job you might otherwise like. When the praise keeps arriving and the pay does not move, people start to describe themselves as taken for granted, and that feeling is usually accurate. It is also, in my experience, what eventually makes somebody leave a role they were happy in, which costs the employer far more than the raise would have.

Where to start this week

Send the email. Not the whole process, just the email.

Then put the half hour in your calendar to write your list and find your number, and put it before the meeting rather than the night before. Say your number out loud a few times, in an actual voice, until it stops sounding strange to you. That is not a confidence exercise, it is just rehearsal, and it means the first time your manager hears you say it will not be the first time you have heard yourself say it.

One thing I would say plainly. Asking to be paid in line with what you do is not an imposition on anybody, and it is a completely ordinary part of a working relationship. It is also, for some people, genuinely uncomfortable in a way that has nothing to do with how good they are at their job. Both of those things are true at once, and preparing properly is what makes the second one smaller.

Common questions

How much of a raise should I ask for?

Ask for what the market pays for the work you are doing now, which is a figure you look up rather than a percentage you pick. If you are starting from well below the range, the gap may be larger than any single raise will close, and in that case the useful conversation is about a path over two or three steps with dates attached.

Should I ask for a raise by email or in person?

Use the email to get the meeting and have the conversation in person or on a call. Email is excellent for making the appointment and poor for the discussion, because you cannot hear how something is landing and a written number tends to get forwarded before it gets discussed.

When is the best time to ask for a raise?

The two useful moments are shortly before budgets are set for the next period, which your manager can tell you, and shortly after you have finished something that went visibly well. Avoid the week your team is in a crisis, not because it is rude but because nobody has the attention for it.

What if my manager says there is no budget?

Ask what would need to be true for that to change and when you should raise it again, and then write down what they say. A specific answer is something you can work with and return to. A vague answer repeated over several quarters is your signal to look at what else is available to you.

*This article is education and coaching rather than financial, tax, legal or employment advice, and it cannot account for your own situation or the rules where you work.*

The hardest part of asking for a raise is not the number. It is the sentence that gets the meeting

in the diary, and that one you can write today.