How Much Should You Counter a Job Offer? (A Simple Way to Pick Your Number)

You’ve decided to counter. That part’s settled — the offer is lower than the role is worth, and you’re not going to just sign. But now you’re staring at a blank reply with a cursor blinking, and the only question left is the hard one: how much? Ask for too little and you leave money on the table for the next two years. Ask for a wild number with nothing behind it and you look like you don’t know the market. Somewhere between those two is a figure that’s ambitious and defensible at the same time — and picking it feels like it should require a spreadsheet and a nerve you don’t have.

It doesn’t. Choosing how much to counter is a short, repeatable process: find the market rate, anchor high but defensible, use whatever leverage you actually hold, and set a private floor. Get those four right and the number picks itself. Picking the figure is one step in the larger playbook for how to negotiate a salary offer; this guide is the deep dive on that step. It walks through each one — and then the part nobody warns you about: that landing on the perfect figure is only half the job, because you still have to say it out loud without walking it back.

Start from the market rate, not the offer

The most common mistake is treating the company’s number as the center of gravity. It isn’t. Their offer is one data point — a low one, by design — and if you counter as a percentage of it, you’ve let them set the anchor. Start instead from what the role actually pays.

That means looking it up before you pick anything. A few free places give you real numbers by role, level, and location:

• Levels.fyi — crowdsourced compensation data broken down by company, level, and role, including the total-comp split of base, stock, and bonus. Best for tech and for seeing where a specific title sits at a specific company.
• Payscale — a personalized “What Am I Worth?” salary report based on your title, experience, skills, and location. Broader than tech.
• Glassdoor — salary ranges by job title and company, useful for a second read on the range and for company-specific patterns.

Triangulate across two or three of these rather than trusting one. What you want out of this step is a defensible band — “someone at my level in this role and city earns roughly X to Y” — because that band, not the offer, is what your counter will point to.

Anchor high — but defensible

Now the number itself. The rule of thumb most people land on is to counter 10–20% above the offer: 10% is the conservative end, 20% leans on their budget. That band is a useful frame, but treat it as a sanity check against your market band from step one, not as the whole answer. If the market says the role pays well above a 20% bump, the market wins; if a 20% bump would sail past every benchmark you found, dial it back so the figure stays credible.

Two rules make the anchor hold:

1. One specific number, not a range. Say “$128,000,” not “$120–130k.” Offer a range and the employer latches onto the bottom of it — you’ve pre-negotiated yourself down before they’ve said a word. A single, slightly unusual figure also signals you did the math rather than rounding to a hopeful guess.
2. Aim at the top of what you can justify. If they negotiate you down from a well-supported high anchor, you still land somewhere you’re happy with. Anchor at the offer and there’s nowhere to go but under it.

The word doing the work here is defensible. High is easy; high-with-a-reason is what survives contact with a recruiter. Which is the whole point of starting from market data — the number arrives already attached to a fact.

Let your leverage carry the number

A number lands harder when something is standing behind it. In rough order of strength:

• A competing offer. The strongest single piece of leverage there is. You don’t have to threaten anything — naming it plainly (“I’m holding another offer at $X”) lets the fact do the pushing.
• Market data. Nearly as strong, and available to everyone. The Harvard Program on Negotiation describes the sharpest way to use it as a “non-offer offer” — anchoring with a market fact instead of a demand: “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve heard that people like me typically earn $80,000 to $90,000.” It puts a number on the table and hands the other side the job of correcting it, which is a very different posture from asking a favor. The same source notes the payoff plainly: people who negotiate their starting salary raise their pay by an average of about $5,000 — money that compounds through every raise that follows.
• Scope and specialized skills. The responsibilities you’ll actually own, or a rare skill they were hiring for, justify sitting at the top of the band.

Pick the strongest thing that’s true for you and let it say the number. This — deciding not just the figure but the specific number and reason, before you reply — is the beating heart of how to counter a job offer at all. The counter that works is a number plus a reason, delivered as one calm sentence.

Set a walk-away floor — and keep it to yourself

The last number you pick is the one you’ll never say out loud. Your walk-away floor is the lowest figure you’d genuinely accept — below it, you’d rather keep looking. Decide it in advance, in private, and keep it there.

Its whole job is to protect you from yourself in the live moment. When the recruiter goes quiet or says “that’s above our band,” an unprepared candidate fills the silence by discounting — sliding toward whatever number ends the discomfort. A floor you fixed beforehand gives you a hard stop: you can flex between your counter and your floor, but you already know where the ground is, so you can’t accidentally fall through it. Never volunteer the floor. The number you name is your counter; the floor stays in your head.

The number is only half the job

Here’s what the math doesn’t cover. You can find the market rate, anchor at a defensible high, line up your leverage, and set a floor — and still lose it in the five seconds after the recruiter pushes back and you hear your own voice go small. Because knowing your number and being able to say it — steadily, without immediately shaving it to fill the silence — are two different skills. The first is a decision. The second is a rep.

This is where most well-prepared people leak the money they just calculated so carefully: not on the notepad, but in the live moment, when the calm figure they picked comes out as a nervous “…but I’m flexible.” The words matter as much as the number — which is why it’s worth having a salary negotiation script for the exact sentence, and then practicing it until saying your figure feels boring.

So rehearse it the way you’d rehearse anything that matters under pressure — out loud, against pushback, until the number stops making your voice shake. That’s the whole idea behind Voiced: you load your actual offer, name your counter against an AI recruiter that pushes back like the real one, and it shows you the exact phrase that just cost you money — then hands you a stronger one to say instead.

Pick the market rate, anchor high but defensible, let your leverage carry it, and keep your floor private. Do that and the number stops being a guess and becomes a decision you’ve already made — one you just have to say out loud like you mean it.