A department head suspects their staff's pay progression is falling behind a comparable department's, and that it's starting to show up as turnover. Making the case for a budget adjustment requires more than a hunch — it requires a side-by-side comparison, department to department, using the same public data everyone else can already see.
The department head compares their own department's rollup in CompensationAtlas against a comparable department — similar titles, similar responsibilities, similar headcount.
The comparison shows that a mid-level title in the other department has seen faster raises over the past three years for materially similar work, while the department head's own staff in an equivalent role have progressed more slowly.
A retention problem is easier to fix when you can point to exactly where the pay gap opened, and against whom.
The department head takes the side-by-side comparison into a budget conversation, backed by the same public payroll data anyone else could pull — not an internal estimate that can be waved away.
Department leadership and city HR analysts building the case for a pay adjustment, and budget offices evaluating requests across multiple departments at once.