Building Your Own Salary Scale in 2026: Why a Spreadsheet Will Get You in Trouble

You type "how to build a salary scale spreadsheet" into Google. Good instinct: you want a grip on your pay structure without spending thousands on a consultancy. The internet is full of free templates, and a table with grades and steps is built in an afternoon.

Yet in 2026 that exact route hits a wall. Not because a spreadsheet cannot hold a table, but because under the EU Pay Transparency Directive a salary scale has to be something other than a tidy table: it has to be defensible. And that is exactly what the spreadsheet route does not give you.

This article explains why, and what sits between free-but-arbitrary and expensive-but-slow.

Why everyone reaches for a spreadsheet

The reason is simple: the alternative looks unaffordable. A classic job evaluation project through a consultancy (ORBA, Hay) starts at hundreds in setup costs plus a fee per job profile. Add that up for ten roles and you are quickly heading toward five figures, with weeks of lead time.

For a company of fifteen people that is not realistic. So you grab a template, look at a few competitor vacancies, and fill in the table. Understandable. But you are solving the wrong problem. Building a scale is easy. Building a scale that holds up when someone questions it, that is the real work.

The four traps of the spreadsheet scale

1. Arbitrariness instead of criteria. In a spreadsheet you pick the amounts yourself. That feels like control, but it is precisely what the directive forbids. Pay has to rest on objective, gender-neutral criteria. "This felt like a logical number" is not a criterion. The moment an employee or inspector asks why a role sits in grade 6 and not 7, you have no answer that survives scrutiny.

2. No benchmark, so no market backing. A scale without market data is a shot in the dark. And "in line with the market" is no longer an acceptable cover: you must name concrete figures and show what they rest on. What a couple of competitors put in their vacancy is not a benchmark, it is a handful of loose data points.

3. Roles that contradict each other. This is the silent killer. You set the salary for the senior technician on its own, and the team lead for planning on its own. Two separate estimates, and without noticing it the technician ends up higher than the team lead, while the team lead clearly carries more responsibility in your company. Put those two side by side in front of an employee and your story collapses. A table guarantees no internal consistency; you have to build that on purpose.

4. Maintenance you underestimate. A job structure ages. Roles change, new ones appear, and without a maintenance plan your neat spreadsheet is skewed again within a few years. The initial afternoon of work is not the cost, keeping it current is.

What the law actually asks of you

The Pay Transparency Directive does not force you into an expensive, formal system. But it does require three concrete things, regardless of company size:

1. A salary range in every vacancy. No more "competitive", but a real band or starting figure.
2. Being able to demonstrate, on request, that your pay policy is objective and gender-neutral.
3. Being able to explain how roles relate to one another, when someone asks why colleague X earns more than colleague Y in a comparable role.

The directive itself names the four factors on which you weigh roles: skills and knowledge, effort, responsibility, and working conditions. That is the criterion your spreadsheet is missing. Not the amounts, but the reasoning underneath them.

The middle between free and expensive

The market offers you two extremes. Free (a spreadsheet), but arbitrary and indefensible. Or a consultancy, defensible but expensive and slow. The whole middle, fast and cheap and defensible, did not exist.

That is what we built loontransparantie.aycabtu.com for. The same method a consultancy uses (weighing roles on the four legal factors and turning them into consistent bands), but without the project that costs thousands. In short:

• Paste in one role. The vacancy text or job profile is enough. The tool extracts the level, scope and required skills and maps them onto the four factors.
• You confirm and correct. The completed form is your compliance document straight away: the objective criteria you must be able to make available on request.
• You get a substantiated band. Minimum, median and maximum with steps, the criteria the band rests on, a collective-agreement note, a ready-to-use salary line for your vacancy, and source references.
• Scale up to your whole company. Multiple roles get bundled into one consistent ladder. On every change the entire structure is recalculated, so the internal relationships keep holding. Exactly the consistency a spreadsheet does not give you.

Want to see what an outcome looks like first? Take a look at the example job structure of an installation SME with five roles.

What it costs

Your first role analysis is free, no strings attached. So you see what the tool delivers before you pay anything. After that, a single analysis is 24.95 euro, no subscription.

Want your whole company mapped at once, then there are packages from 395 euro. They include the full job structure and the Pay Rationale: a downloadable PDF with the method used, the weighted scores per role on the four directive factors, the criteria per grade and a compliance section. That is the document you hand over when someone challenges your pay policy. Updating it as roles change costs nothing extra. No annual contract, no consultant billing by the hour.

The bottom line

Building your own salary scale is a good instinct, but a spreadsheet solves the wrong problem. A table of amounts is quickly made; a scale that holds up under the Pay Transparency Directive needs documented criteria, a real benchmark and internal consistency. That is not a matter of nicer formatting, it is a different method.

You do not need to hire a consultancy for that, and you do not need to puzzle it together in a spreadsheet yourself either.

Start with your first role, free →