For many of us, negotiating salary and benefits is one of the most stressful experiences imaginable. In fact, among 2,000 recent higher-education graduates surveyed by banking app Chime, 54% said they found negotiating their salary to be “more painful than breaking up with a partner.”
The question of how to negotiate pay in an interview can be so anxiety-provoking that many people choose not to negotiate their starting salary at all. In a 2023 Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 employed adults, about 60% said they did not ask for higher pay, often because they didn’t feel comfortable doing so. Similarly, in 2025, Resume Genius found that 55% of Americans surveyed did not negotiate their initial job offer.
That’s unfortunate because 78% of those who did negotiate told Resume Genius that they ended up with a better offer. A full 51% said their salary request was fully matched, and 27% said they got a somewhat higher offer. Younger employees were more likely to negotiate their starting salary, likely because they are aware that workplace norms have shifted in favor of job offer negotiation over the years.
Negotiation avoidance is a widespread phenomenon in job negotiations and beyond, research has shown. What’s more, our estimates of the likely risks and rewards of negotiating are often faulty and illogical.
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Encouraging Pay Negotiations
In a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, researchers Zoe Cullen (Harvard Business School), Bobak Pakzad-Hurson (Brown University), and Ricardo Perez-Truglia (UCLA) tested interventions aimed at encouraging job candidates to negotiate their job offers more frequently.
For the experiment, the team recruited about 3,858 U.S. tech job seekers, about 73% of them currently employed, who were using an online platform to find work between May 2023 and February 2025. The workers were 31 years old, on average, and had about seven years of work experience with companies including Google, Meta, and Apple in roles such as software engineer, product manager, and data scientist. They were well paid, with salaries averaging around $220,000, and about 20% were women.
The researchers hypothesized that there may be two main reasons people are reluctant to negotiate job offers. First, they might believe that an offer is nonnegotiable and that attempting to negotiate it could lead the employer to rescind the offer or could strain the relationship. Second, candidates might worry that they lack the information and skills needed to negotiate effectively, such as how much money would be reasonable to ask for or how to frame their offer.
The researchers devised treatments to target each of these possibilities. In the “encouragement treatment,” they encouraged 1,336 job seekers to negotiate offers by giving them advice, such as “Companies expect you to negotiate” and “Don’t feel guilty about negotiating.” Those in this group also learned that about 85% of job candidates who ask for more make some progress and were told that failing to negotiate can significantly depress one’s earnings over the course of a career.
When surveyed months later, 82% of the participants in this group reported receiving at least one job offer. About 61% said they had tried to negotiate an initial offer, as compared to 54% of those in a control group (who were not encouraged to negotiate). Those who negotiated gained about $27,000 annually above their initial offer.
The other treatment involved offering job seekers a steep discount on personalized negotiation coaching from an experienced coach, a service offered by the job website. Few of the participants were willing to pay for the coaching.
Negotiating Your Job Offer
Overall, these tech job seekers seemed to be more concerned that they would be penalized for negotiating than they were about their negotiating ability. Notably, during the study period, the tech sector experienced a hiring slump, and employers reportedly began to make take-it-or-leave-it offers more frequently than in the past. Yet the fact that most of those who chose to negotiate made significant salary gains suggests that the fear of having an offer revoked is likely overblown.
These and other results suggest the following guidelines on how to negotiate pay in an interview:
- Research industry norms. Ask around your network to determine whether job offers are generally negotiable in your industry and in the organization that’s interviewing you. Odds are the answer will be yes.
- Take a long-term view. Calculate not only how much you might gain over the next year by asking for a higher salary but also how much more such an increase would net you over the course of your career (factoring in likely annual raises). This sum is likely to be significant and highly motivating.
- Look beyond salary. In addition to your salary, consider negotiating benefits and other aspects of your offer where you would like to see improvement. Prepare to make trade-offs on the issues the employer values most.
What other advice would you offer on how to negotiate pay in an interview?
Claim your FREE copy: Salary Negotiations
Discover how to refine your negotiation skills with this free special report, Salary Negotiations: How to Negotiate Salary: Learn the Best Techniques to Help You Manage the Most Difficult Salary Negotiations and What You Need to Know When Asking for a Raise, from Harvard Law School.
