Quantum RewardPAY ANALYTICS & RESEARCH

Pay analytics & compensation research

You have the data.
We build the
analysis.

Send us what you already hold. Offers you made, salaries you pay, people who left.

We turn it into a pay structure you can defend, anchored to public official statistics. You see the finished deliverable first. You decide afterwards.

And if the data cannot leave your building, we ship you the model instead and you run it yourself.

See a full deliverable Get in touch

No licensed survey data. Those licences forbid redistribution, so a report built on them cannot show its own working. Ours can.

Why people call us

One of these is usually the reason.

01
Two people doing the same job, forty percent apart, and nobody can explain why. It was defensible each time it happened. It is not defensible all at once.
02
You are about to publish a salary range and you do not have one. A job advert is a bad place to discover what your pay structure actually says.
03
Your annual salary guide is due and your researchers are on live searches. The report your market expects, competing for the hours that actually bill.
04
One counter offer just reset a structure that took a year to build. Every exception is a precedent, and precedents compound faster than budgets.

Why the analysis matters

A raise is only a raise after inflation.

In 2022 a company in Warsaw awarded its team eight percent. Prices rose by 14.4 percent that year. It was a pay cut, delivered in a letter that said congratulations.

Consumer price inflation, 2022 to 2024
Annual percentage change. Source: World Bank, retrieved August 2026.
4% merit budget
8.0
4.1
2.9
7.9
6.8
3.3
14.4
11.5
3.8
United States2022 · 2023 · 2024
United Kingdom2022 · 2023 · 2024
Poland2022 · 2023 · 2024

Everything below the dashed line is a real increase. Everything above it is a real cut. In Poland in 2022 a four percent budget was worth minus 10.4 percent. The four percent line is an illustration, not a published figure. Your own budget, applied to your own locations, is the first thing we compute.

The work

A complete deliverable, not a capability deck.

Three working models you can pull apart right now, then a finished deliverable. Everything here runs on sample figures. The point is what happens when the numbers are yours.

Live models
Move the sliders. The analysis recomputes.
These are the same models we run against client data, stripped back to the controls that matter. Nothing is submitted anywhere.
Country
Year
Merit budget you awarded 4.0%
0.0%
real change in pay
You gave
4.0%
Prices rose
0.0%
Inflation is real data: World Bank, consumer prices, annual percentage change, retrieved August 2026. Real change shown as the simple difference, the convention used in merit planning.

And here is what a finished deliverable looks like. A full pay architecture for a fictional company of 180 people across three countries, sent in full before anyone asks.

Executive summary page showing the cost to bring everyone to range minimum and the saving from capping base pay
The two numbers leadership actually asks about
Compa ratio governance matrix mapping performance rating against position in range
The matrix that replaces negotiation with a rule
Pay transparency readiness assessment across six required capabilities
Readiness, and the one capability we do not claim

If it looks like something you would put your name on, tell us what you are trying to solve. If it does not, no conversation was needed.

Take one with you

Two working files. No email address required.
We say we can ship you models you run on your own data behind your own firewall. Here are two of them, free, right now, so you can check that claim instead of taking it on trust.
The pay structure model
An Excel workbook with live formulas, not pasted values. Change the range width and every band, compa ratio and remediation figure recalculates. Arrives filled with a fictional company of 24 people. Five sheets including a one page runbook and a written list of what it does not do. No macros, so enterprise IT will not block it.
Download the workbook XLSX · 14 KB · opens in Excel, LibreOffice or Google Sheets
The pay structure dashboard
One HTML file. Double click and it opens in any browser. No install, no server, no admin rights, nothing to approve. Paste your own grades and salaries into it and every tile, band and status recalculates. It makes no network requests at all, so you can run it on a disconnected machine and watch it behave identically.
Download the dashboard HTML · 25 KB · works offline, nothing is transmitted
You will not find a client list on this site

Most of what we produce is published under somebody else's name. A search firm's annual salary guide. A consultancy's band structure. A vendor's research report. The people reading those documents are not supposed to know we exist, and the firms who commission them are not looking for a case study about themselves.

So instead of logos, here is the thing a logo is meant to stand in for. The models above are live and you can break them. The deliverable is shown in full rather than described. The method is published in enough detail that you can check the arithmetic yourself. Judge the work, because that is all a reference would have told you anyway.

Discretion
White label by default. Your name on the cover, no attribution to us, written into the engagement rather than promised in conversation.
Contracting
A registered proprietorship. We sign your NDA and your paper, not ours, and we invoice against it.
Your data
An extract you choose, never system access. Returned or destroyed on completion, your choice, confirmed in writing.

Two ways to work

If you cannot share the data, take the model instead.

Pay data is the most sensitive data in the building. Plenty of leaders want the analysis and simply cannot send salaries to an outside domain, whether that is policy, legal, works council or instinct. That objection usually ends the conversation. Here it does not.

Option one

Send us the data

You share offers, payroll and attrition under an NDA. We build the analysis and hand back the finished deliverable.

  • Fastest route. Days rather than weeks, because nobody is learning a new tool.
  • Sharper analysis. We see the whole distribution, so we catch what a template cannot.
  • An extract, never system access. You choose the fields and export them. We do not connect to your HRIS.
  • Names are not needed. An employee ID, a grade, a location and a salary is enough for almost everything.
  • Data returned or destroyed on completion, your choice, confirmed in writing.
Right when the data can leave and you want the answer, not the machinery.
Option two

Take the model. Keep your data.

You send us nothing. We build the model against sample figures, ship you the whole package, and you drop your own numbers in behind your own firewall. We never see a salary.

  • An Excel model with live formulas, not pasted values. Change an input and every number downstream recalculates.
  • No macros. Macro enabled workbooks get blocked by enterprise IT, so there are none.
  • A dashboard as a single HTML file. Double click, it opens in any browser. No install, no server, no admin rights.
  • Works fully offline. Nothing phones home, nothing is transmitted. It will pass a security review because there is nothing to review.
  • A worked example pre filled with sample data, so you can see it running before you touch your own.
  • A one page runbook and a version stamp with file hashes, so a year from now you know exactly what you are looking at.
Most firms cannot offer this. When the product is a licensed dataset, the model is the asset, so handing it over ends the business. Ours is public data and transparent logic, which is precisely why we can give it to you.

What we can build you

Every one of these ships either way, as a finished deliverable or as a model you run yourself.

Interactive
  • Interactive dashboards
  • Interactive web pages
  • Scenario and what if calculators
  • Excel models with live formulas
  • Data entry templates with validation
  • Budget planning tools
Analytics
  • Attrition analytics
  • Heatmaps by grade, function and location
  • Compa ratio and range penetration
  • Offer acceptance curves
  • Cost to remediate modelling
  • Merit budget and real pay analysis
  • Pay gap grouping structure
Reports
  • Portfolio reports
  • Board and CFO decks
  • Print ready PDF reports
  • Annual salary guides, white label
  • Benchmarking summaries
  • Methodology appendices
Frameworks
  • Salary bands and job architecture
  • Level descriptors
  • Compa ratio governance matrices
  • Promotion and increment policy
  • Interview scorecards
  • Employee explainers
  • Manager one pagers
This is a starting point, not a menu.
If the thing you need is not on the list, describe it. We will tell you honestly whether we can build it, roughly what it would take, and if the answer is no we will say so rather than reshape your problem into something we already make.
Describe what you need

Not sure which route fits? Tell us what the constraint is and we will say which one we would pick in your position.

The difference

Four things a firm built on proprietary data cannot do.

None of these are claims about working harder. They are structural, and they are the reason this practice exists.

01
We publish the method
A firm whose advantage is a licensed dataset cannot show you how a number was made without destroying the asset it sells. Ours is public, so the derivation ships with the work. Every source named, every adjustment stated, every date recorded.
02
We work under your name
White label by default. Your logo, your foreword, your client relationship. We have no interest in being visible to the people you serve, which is exactly why firms that publish their own research use us.
03
We tell you what we did not assess
Every deliverable carries a limits page. Pay equity testing, individual placement, statutory compliance, all named as out of scope rather than quietly implied as covered. Clients tell us it is the page they read first.
04
You see the work before you commit
We build the analysis on your data and show you the finished deliverable. Then you decide whether there is a conversation to have. Nobody is asked to buy a description of something.

Engagements

Where most engagements start.

The capability list above is what we can build. These are the four pieces of work people actually ask for, and any of them can arrive as a finished deliverable or as a model you run yourself.

01 · Pay architecture

Salary bands and job levelling

Grades, ranges, midpoint progression and overlap. A compa ratio matrix so managers apply a rule instead of negotiating. Level descriptors that settle a promotion argument in writing. Geographic differentials that move the whole range, so a promotion means the same thing in every country.

Built from your payroll, offer and attrition data
02 · Research

White label reports and salary guides

The annual guide your firm publishes, produced for you. Built on public official statistics with the derivation documented well enough that a sceptical reader can check it, which is what makes a prospect forward it internally rather than skim it.

Your brand on the cover, no attribution to us
03 · Readiness

Pay transparency preparation

You cannot publish a pay range you do not have. We build the structure that makes disclosure possible, quantify what it costs to bring everyone above their range minimum, and sequence the rollout so a job posting is not what tells your team.

Includes the remediation cost, computed on your headcount
04 · Communication

The explainer employees actually read

Most companies build a structure and never explain it, so nobody believes it. We write the plain language piece that answers the eight questions people really ask, including the awkward ones about why a colleague earns more.

Written to be handed straight to your whole company

Why this became urgent

The deadline has already passed.
The EU Pay Transparency Directive is not coming. For anyone employing people in the EU it is the law now, and the first reports are due next June.
7 June 2026
Member states were required to have the Directive in national law. That date is behind us.
7 June 2027
First pay gap reports due from employers of 150 or more, covering the previous calendar year. Annually from then for 250 and above.
7 June 2031
Employers of 100 to 149 join, then every three years.

The reporting year for the first deadline is the calendar year you are currently in. Whatever your pay data looks like over the coming months is what gets reported.

There is a second clause that catches most people. Where an unexplained gap of five percent or more shows up in any category of worker and is not resolved within six months, the employer has to run a joint pay assessment with worker representatives. You cannot explain a gap by pointing at a structure you never built, and you cannot publish a range you do not have.

None of this is legal advice and the detail differs by member state, so take local counsel. The structural work underneath it is the same everywhere, and it is the part that takes time rather than the part that takes a lawyer.

Directive (EU) 2023/970, Articles 9, 10 and 34.

The method

Your data, anchored to public statistics.

Five steps. Each one is recorded in the deliverable, so any figure can be traced back to a source, a date and a stated adjustment.

STEP 01
Anchor
BLS Occupational Employment Statistics, ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, Eurostat, national statistics offices. Industry cuts, never national averages.
STEP 02
Age
Public wage data is always stale. We age it using the Employment Cost Index, never headline CPI, which is the most common analytical error in this work.
STEP 03
Level weight
Grades mapped to percentiles of the adjusted distribution, interpolated log linearly because wage distributions are skewed to the right.
STEP 04
Blend
Your offers made, accepted and declined. Your attrition. Weighted by how much evidence there actually is, not by preference.
STEP 05
Publish
Sources with retrieval dates, adjustments applied, assumptions written down, and an explicit list of what was not assessed.

Step 04, in plain terms

0 half all 10 30 60 120 offers and exits you can give us
  • Five Your data is an anecdote. The public figures do nearly all of the work.
  • Thirty Equal footing. Your evidence and the published statistics carry the same weight.
  • Sixty Your data decides. The public anchor becomes a check on it.
  • A hundred The market you actually compete in is now visible, and it is rarely the market the averages describe.

This is what keeps the work honest in both directions. It stops six data points being treated as truth, and it stops sixty being ignored because a published table felt more official. If your sample is thin we say so, and the structure is marked provisional.

Who we work with

Firms that publish, and firms that are scaling.

Executive search firms

You publish an annual salary guide because your market expects it. We produce it, under your name, so your researchers can stay on searches.

HR and reward consultancies

Capacity is the bottleneck, not demand. We are the production layer behind band structures and job architecture your clients never see us build.

HR technology vendors

The State of Compensation report your category expects. Built so a prospect can check it, which is what makes it travel.

Companies of 80 to 400

The size where pay decisions stop scaling one at a time and every offer quietly becomes a precedent.

What we hold ourselves to

Four words, and what each one costs us.

Values are cheap to write and expensive to keep. These are the four we are prepared to be measured against, defined so you can tell when we have failed one.

01
Speed
Days, not months. A pay structure inside a week, a research report inside three. The analysis is engineered rather than assembled by hand, which is why the clock is short and the price is not a proxy for effort.
02
Excellence
Every number traceable to a source and a date. If we cannot show you the working, we do not ship the number. And when something was not assessed, it is named on the page rather than left for you to assume.
03
Execution
Finished artefacts, not recommendations. You get the model, the deck and the page, ready to put your name on. Nobody has ever been helped by a slide that says consider developing a framework.
04
Capability
If it can be measured, it can be built. Tell us the question and we will build the thing that answers it, or tell you plainly that we cannot. Both are more useful than a maybe.

What happens next

You see it working before you owe us anything.

Said plainly, with dates, so it is a process rather than a promise. There is no discovery phase you pay for and no proposal document to sit through.

Day zero
You send three lines
A headcount, the functions involved and the countries. That is genuinely enough to begin. No call unless you want one, no form, no salary data.
Day two
You get a scope and a price
A fixed price per deliverable, agreed before anything starts. No hourly billing and no change orders. If we are not the right people for it, you find out here, and that costs you nothing.
Day five
The pilot is in your hands
One job family, one country, built properly and built free. Not a sample chapter or a mockup. A real piece of the actual deliverable, on your data or on the model, whichever route you chose.
Then you decide
Or you do not
If it is not what you wanted, you keep the pilot and we part cleanly. Nobody chases you. We would rather lose two days than talk somebody into work they did not need.
Why the pilot is bounded. One job family in one country is roughly two days of work, and we will do that for anyone who is serious. A whole architecture given away free would only mean charging somebody else for it. The scope is small so the offer can be real.

Straight answers

The questions people email us first.

What do you actually need from us to start?

To scope it, three lines: headcount, functions, countries. To build it, an extract with an employee reference, a grade or job title, a location and a base salary. Names are not needed and we would rather not have them. Offers made, accepted and declined, plus leavers with their exit dates, make the analysis considerably sharper, but they are not required.

A spreadsheet is fine. We do not connect to your HRIS and we do not want credentials for anything.

How long does it take?

A pay structure inside a week from the day the data lands. A white label research report or salary guide inside three. The pilot comes back within five days of your first email.

These are short because the analysis is engineered rather than assembled by hand. If something will take longer, you are told the date up front rather than discovering it later.

How do you price it?

A fixed price per deliverable, agreed before we start. No hourly billing, no day rates, no change orders and no discovery phase you pay for. You know the number and the date before anything begins.

We price the artefact, not the effort, which means an efficient method benefits you rather than costing us. Nothing is billed until the pilot has been seen.

Is a person doing this work, or is it generated?

A fair question to ask anyone in 2026, and the honest answer is both. Software does the arithmetic, the aging, the interpolation and the document build, which is exactly why the turnaround is days rather than months. The judgement is not automated: which occupational codes actually map to your roles, which comparator market you are really in, when a sample is too thin to carry a conclusion, and when a number is technically correct but would mislead the person reading it.

The reason you do not have to take that on faith is the method. Every figure ships with its source, its retrieval date and the adjustment applied, so you can reproduce any number in the deliverable yourself. Work that cannot survive being checked is not worth buying, whoever or whatever produced it.

Do you sign our NDA, or do we sign yours?

Yours. We sign your paper and invoice against it. We are a registered proprietorship and we contract in our own name.

If your legal team would rather nothing left the building at all, that is what the second route exists for. You send us nothing, we ship you the model, and there is no data to protect because we never receive any.

Who owns what you produce?

You do, outright, on payment. Including the models and the spreadsheets, not just the finished document. You can edit them, rebuild them next year without us, or hand them to another firm.

We keep no residual claim and we do not reuse your figures in anyone else's work. Nothing we build for you carries our name unless you ask it to.

What if our data is thin?

Then we say so on the page. Your own evidence is weighted by how much of it there actually is, so six data points do not get treated as truth and sixty do not get ignored because a published table looked more official.

Where the sample cannot carry a conclusion, the structure is marked provisional and the reason is written down. A confident number built on nothing is the most expensive thing in this field.

Where are you based, and where does our data sit?

We are a registered proprietorship operating from India, working across UK, EU, US, Gulf and Indian pay markets. Contracting and invoicing are in our own name.

Data you send stays on encrypted storage under our control, is never placed in a shared drive or a third party analytics tool, and is returned or destroyed on completion, your choice, confirmed in writing. If cross border transfer is the obstacle rather than a preference, take the model route instead and the question does not arise.

Get in touch

Tell us what you are trying to defend.

A headcount, a function and the countries involved is enough to begin. We will tell you before you commit whether we are the right people for it, and if we are not, we will say so.

Start the email See the work first

The button opens your mail client with the three questions already in it. Or write to [email protected] however you like.