The archive · Work & Ways of Doing · Operational decision · 2013–2024
Buffer publishes every salary and the formula behind it — pay becomes a public document
Startup CEO Joel Gascoigne makes pay a formula, then publishes all salaries and the formula itself — 'default to transparency' turns compensation into trust.
Buffer
What it had to solve
Buffer's second core value was 'Default to Transparency': the team already published revenues, user numbers and internal emails, so compensation was the last black box. In December 2013 the company had 17 people, and CEO Joel Gascoigne decided pay should follow the same rule — transparency breeds trust, and trust is the foundation of great teamwork.
How it works
Buffer built its culture around 'Default to Transparency', the second of nine core values: the social media startup already published monthly revenues, user numbers and progress reports, and even cc'ed whole teams on internal emails. In December 2013, with 17 employees, CEO Joel Gascoigne applied the same logic to the most guarded number in any company — what people are paid.
On December 19, 2013, he published the salary formula on the company's Open blog: Salary = job type × seniority × experience + location (+$10K if you choose salary over equity), with base pay from $45,000 for a 'happiness hero' to $75,000 for an executive officer, multipliers for seniority and experience, and location bands from +$22K (San Francisco, London, Tokyo-class cities) to +$0K. Alongside it he listed every individual salary — 13 full-time employees plus four in the 45-day Bootcamp trial — and pointed to a public spreadsheet with the equity breakdown.
The rationale was explicit: 'Transparency breeds trust, and trust is the foundation of great teamwork.' Publishing pay removed the two-person negotiation and made favoritism visible, while the public spreadsheet meant candidates could calculate exactly what any role would earn. Gascoigne called the formula 'a living document', and press coverage from Entrepreneur, Quartz and others framed it as one of the boldest compensation experiments in the startup world.
A decade later the transparency had survived growth from 17 to 75 people and from $2.2M to $18M in annual recurring revenue. The formula was iterated — a Good Life Curve in 2015, a Buffer Benchmark in 2017, Radford market data in 2018 — with Buffer committing never to cut salaries when the formula changed. In 2024 the company replaced the increasingly complex formula with a full Open Salary System, keeping the founding bet: pay stays public.
Why it lands
- A formula removes negotiation from pay: the method, not the person's leverage, decides the number.
- Publishing the method alongside the numbers made trust verifiable — anyone could recompute a salary.
- It matched an existing culture: revenue, emails and progress were already public, so pay was the odd one out.
- Candidates could self-select: knowing the exact salary before applying attracted people aligned with the values.
- The 'living document' framing turned later formula fixes into raises, never pay cuts — reinforcing trust.
What it did
The post was covered by Entrepreneur, Quartz, Fast Company and others as an unprecedented move, with salaries running from about $70,000 at the low end to Gascoigne's $158,800. Buffer kept salaries public for a decade straight: by 2024 the team had grown from 17 to 75 people, roles from 8 to 30, and ARR from $2.2M to $18M — while the formula itself became a template other companies copied.
What you can take
Radical transparency works when the method is public too: a formula removes negotiation and favoritism from pay — but only if you keep it simple enough that everyone can still understand it.
Since then
Buffer kept all salaries public for over a decade, iterating the formula roughly every two years: the Good Life Curve (2015), the Buffer Benchmark (2017) and Radford market data (2018), each update raising pay — the 2018 change alone added $711,565 per year, accepted as the cost of consistency. Buffer also logged the downsides publicly: rigidity for new roles, extra work, and complexity that eventually eroded understanding. In January 2024 it replaced the formula with a more legible Open Salary System, still fully public — by then a team of 75 with an average salary of $151,113.
Sources
- Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer: Our Transparent Formula and All Individual Salaries
- Should Your Salary Be Made Public?
- Reflecting on a Decade of Transparent Salaries at Buffer
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