Salary Negotiation Tips: What to Say at Each Stage, and When to Stop

Fourteen minutes into a screening call, after the notice period question and before anyone has described the actual work, the recruiter asks what your expected CTC is. You have perhaps three seconds. The recruiter knows the budget, the level and what the last person in the seat was paid. You know none of it.

Most of a salary negotiation is decided at three points. The expected CTC question in screening, the minute an offer is said out loud, and the counter you send a day or two later. People lose most of their money at the first point.

What is the best answer when a recruiter asks for your expected CTC?

Recruiters ask early because it is cheap filtering. If your number sits far above budget, they would rather know now than after three panel rounds. Fair enough, but it means naming a price with the least information you will ever have.

So the first answer contains no number. Here are two ways I have heard candidates say it well.

I would like to understand the scope of the role before I put a figure on it. Is there a band for this position that you can share?

My current CTC is on record, but it is not a good guide for this role, because the scope here is wider. What range are you working with?

Sometimes the deflection does not hold, because a form has a mandatory number field or the recruiter cannot schedule without one. Pushing further then only makes you look difficult.

When you must give a number, give a range that starts at the figure you actually want and extends above it. Daniel Ames and Malia Mason tested this in five studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2015. They found that this kind of range, which they call a bolstering range, earned the person making the offer better terms than a single number did, and the other side judged aggressive counters to it as less polite. Ranges that reached down below the real target did the opposite and left money on the table.

So if your target is 28 lakh fixed, say you are looking at 28 to 32 depending on how the variable pay and any stock are structured. Keep it fairly narrow, since very wide ranges added little in that research.

What should you say when the offer is made on a call?

The recruiter calls, sounds pleased, reads out a number and then pauses. That pause is where people say yes because silence feels rude, and once you have accepted out loud, asking for more looks like bad faith.

Say something close to this.

Thank you, that is good news and I am keen on the role. Could you send the detailed breakup so I can go through the fixed and variable split properly? I will come back to you by Thursday.

It is warm and it contains no number. Name the day, or expect a follow up call before you are ready.

What does a CTC figure hide?

The headline CTC is the least useful line in an offer. Two offers that both say 24 LPA can differ by several lakh in what actually reaches your bank account in the first year. Read the breakup component by component.

Component	What to check
Fixed and variable split	Ask what share of target variable pay was actually paid out last year, across the whole company
Joining bonus	Almost always carries a clawback if you leave within a year or two. Read the exit clause before you count it
Stock or ESOPs	A grant size means little without the strike price, vesting schedule, cliff and what happens to unvested units if you leave
Gratuity	Shown inside CTC by many employers, but paid only once you meet the service condition
Employer provident fund	Your money for the long term, but it does not arrive in your monthly salary

Gratuity is the line people forget. Section 4 of the Payment of Gratuity Act, 1972 makes it payable to a regular employee only after continuous service of not less than five years, at fifteen days of wages for each completed year, with the daily wage worked out by dividing the monthly wage by 26. If you leave in year four, the amount shown in your CTC never reaches you. When comparing two offers, take gratuity out of both.

The rules are shifting. A Government of India note on the labour codes, published in November 2025, says fixed term employees become eligible for gratuity after one year of continuous service, down from five. The same note explains that wages for gratuity and social security now include basic pay, dearness allowance and retaining allowance, and that where allowances run beyond half of total remuneration, the excess is added back into wages. If your basic looks small against the CTC, ask whether the structure is being revised, because that changes your provident fund, your gratuity and your take home.

How much should you counter, and how do you justify it?

Counter above your target. Not wildly above, but above, because most negotiations settle somewhere below the number you open with. If you counter at exactly what you want, you will usually sign for less.

Justify it with two things only. The first is what the market pays for this level. The second is the scope of the role as the interviews revealed it. Your rent and your loan are real, but neither is a reason a hiring manager can write in an approval request.

Many counters work better by email than on a call, because the recruiter needs something to forward. A version that works looks like this.

Thank you for the breakup. I have been through it and I would like to accept, with one point to discuss first. Given that the role covers the analytics function end to end and not a single product line, I would be looking for 32 fixed against the 28 in the letter. I am comfortable with the variable structure. If the fixed component cannot move, I would be open to a joining bonus or an earlier review date instead.

That last sentence is the one people leave out. Recruiters often cannot move base pay because of parity with the existing team. Giving them a second door lets them say yes without anyone losing face. After you send it, wait. Do not follow up the same afternoon with an apology for asking.

Saying it aloud takes practice, and the habits behind a good tell me about yourself answer apply here too. Short sentences, one number, then silence.

What can you negotiate besides the fixed salary?

When the fixed number genuinely cannot move, plenty of other things often can. A joining bonus. Reimbursement of the buyout you owe your current employer for the notice period. A written salary review at six months instead of twelve. Relocation support. The number of office days. The start date. The designation.

Designation costs the employer nothing and is the first thing your next recruiter screens on, so it can be worth more over five years than a few extra lakh today.

Whatever you agree, ask for it in a revised offer letter.

Should you accept a counteroffer from your current employer?

You will see a confident claim that most people who accept a counteroffer leave within months. I have never found a study behind it, so I do not repeat it. The argument against accepting holds up without the statistic.

Your employer has just shown that you were paid less than they were willing to pay, and it took a resignation letter to bring that out. Money rarely fixes whatever made you start interviewing, and your manager now knows you were looking.

There is one honest exception. If pay really was the only problem and the counter is substantial, staying can be the right call.

When is negotiating the wrong move?

Some situations call for a signature. If the offer is already above your target and the market, take it. If you named a figure and they matched it exactly, countering reads as bad faith, and this is the one case where I have seen offers withdrawn. A standard campus package has nobody with authority to change it. And after a long stretch out of work, the risk calculation is simply different.

Freshers have fewer levers than they would like. Entry level bands are fixed and the recruiter usually cannot move them. A second live offer is the only real bargaining power at that stage. Beyond that, negotiate the team, the location and a review date, and choose the role where you will learn fastest. A strong move at eighteen months will do more for your pay than any negotiation on a first offer.

If you are still waiting for that first offer, the problem may be earlier in the process. Our guide on not getting interview calls covers the checks worth running first, and how to prepare for an AI interview helps with the screening round that often comes before any salary talk.

Write your lines down before the first screening call, with your target, your range and your walk away number. The conversation will still be uncomfortable, but it will not be improvised.

Sources

1. Ames and Mason, Tandem anchoring: Informational and politeness effects of range offers in social exchange, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2015
2. Income Tax Department, Government of India, Payment of Gratuity Act 1972, Section 4
3. Press Information Bureau, Government of India, Indias Labour Reforms: Simplification, Security, and Sustainable Growth, 2025