A veteran candidate looks great on paper. Then you hit the comp question. They were an E-7. What does that pay? You search "E-7 salary" and get a base pay number. You think about matching it. Stop right there.

Military base pay is not a civilian salary. It is one piece of a pay package built on a totally different logic. If you anchor your offer to it, you will get the number wrong. Sometimes too low. Sometimes too high. Either way, you lose.

The fix is simple. You do not convert a pay grade into a salary. You match the work to one of your own comp bands. Then you validate with market data. This guide shows you how to do that, step by step, without guessing.

This trips up midsize companies the most. You do not run a formal military-hiring program. But you already have pay bands. You just need a clean way to slot a veteran into them. That is what we will build here.

Why Can't You Just Copy Military Base Pay?

A service member's pay grade tells you their rank and time in service. It does not tell you their job, their budget, or their team size. Two E-6s can do completely different work. One runs a 12-person section. One is a solo specialist. Same pay grade. Different scope.

Base pay is also only part of the deal. Service members get tax-free allowances on top of it. The big ones are Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH) and Basic Allowance for Subsistence (BAS). BAH changes by zip code and rank. A sergeant in San Diego gets a very different housing allowance than the same sergeant in rural Georgia.

So "what does an E-7 make" has no single answer. It depends on location, family size, and special pays. You can see the raw base pay numbers on the official DFAS military pay tables. But that base figure undercounts their real take-home. And it tells you nothing about the job they did.

There is one more trap. Veterans themselves often do not know what their work is worth on the open market. We dug into that in what recruiters get wrong about veteran salary expectations. The short version: they may quote you a low number out of habit. Do not let a low ask set the band. Set the band by the role.

How Do You Read Scope From a Pay Grade?

Pay grades fall into three lanes. Enlisted (E-1 to E-9). Warrant officers (W-1 to W-5). Commissioned officers (O-1 to O-10). Each lane signals a rough level of responsibility. But the grade is a starting clue, not the answer.

Think of it like reading "manager" on a civilian resume. It points you in a direction. Then you read the actual work to confirm. This rough map shows where to start. Use it to know where to look, not to set a number.

None of these are rules. They are where to start digging. The next step is to read the work itself. That is where the real comp signal lives.

What Should You Actually Match On?

Forget the grade for a second. Look at four things on the resume. These are what your comp bands are built around anyway. So match veteran candidates the same way you match anyone else.

People led. How many direct reports? How many total in the chain? A "squad leader" ran about 9 people. A "platoon sergeant" ran 30 to 40. That tells you the management level.

Budget or assets owned. Did they sign for equipment worth millions? Did they manage a maintenance budget? Asset accountability is real fiscal responsibility. It maps to roles that own a P&L line or a department budget.

Decision authority. Could they ground an aircraft? Stop a mission? Approve a contract action? Independent decision rights signal a higher band than the title alone suggests.

Technical depth. Warrant officers and senior enlisted in technical fields are deep experts. A "maintenance test pilot" or a "cyber operations chief" carries skills that command senior pay. Read the technical work, not just the rank.

Want a worked example? Say a candidate was a Marine Corps gunnery sergeant, an E-7. The pay-grade trap says "look up E-7 base pay and match it." The scope read says something else. You read the resume. They ran a 30-person maintenance section. They owned a vehicle fleet worth millions. They had final sign-off on whether trucks rolled out.

That is not an entry job. That is your Maintenance Operations Manager band. So you anchor to that band. You check the BLS median for maintenance managers in your metro. Then you place them by depth. The E-7 grade never entered the math. The work did.

This is the same reading you already do with civilian resumes. We walk through the full method in our screening guide for veteran resumes. For management roles, spotting real project management experience is often the clearest scope signal you will find.

How Do You Build the Comp Band, Step by Step?

This is the clean four-step process. It uses tools you already have. No special veteran pay formula. Just your bands and public market data.

For step three, the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics is the gold standard. It gives you median and percentile wages by occupation and by metro area. As of May 2025, the median wage across all occupations was about $24.51 an hour. That is your baseline reality check. Pull the number for the exact job and your area. Then confirm your band lines up.

Always check the current year. Pay data moves. Military pay tables and BLS figures both update annually. A band built on last year's numbers can drift out of market fast.

What About Allowances and the Pay Cut Worry?

A common fear comes up on the employer side. Employers worry the offer will look lower than military pay. They think the candidate will walk. Sometimes that happens. But it usually comes from comparing the wrong things.

A veteran's military pay included tax-free BAH and BAS. Your salary offer is taxable and has no housing allowance. So a straight number-to-number compare looks worse than it is. The right move is to compare total value, not base to base.

Walk them through it. Your offer includes health benefits, retirement match, paid time off, and any bonus. Their military allowances go away when they separate. A clear total-comp picture often closes the gap. Be honest and show the math.

One legal note. Military leave and pay protections under USERRA are a separate topic from your starting-salary decision. We cover the leave-pay side in whether employers have to pay employees on military leave. That is about reservists who still serve, not about how you set a first offer. Keep the two questions apart.

How Do You Keep It Fair and Consistent?

The whole point of using your own bands is fairness. A veteran goes through the same comp logic as every other hire. Same role, same band, same placement rules. That protects you and them.

Write down your method so every recruiter uses it the same way. When two people apply the "match by scope" process, they should land in the same place. That consistency is what keeps your pay equity clean over time. We go deeper on this in pay and promotion equity for veteran employees.

Keep a short note on each veteran offer too. Write down the role, the scope you read, and the band you landed on. If a candidate or an auditor ever asks how you got the number, you have a clean answer. That paper trail also helps when the veteran negotiates. You can point to the scope read, not a rank, and the conversation stays grounded.

It also helps to compare candidates head to head with the same yardstick. Say you have two strong veterans for one role. Our guide on comparing two veteran candidates fairly keeps the scope read honest.

And remember that the pay grade is just one signal on a resume full of them. The awards, the deployments, the duty titles all add context. Read the whole record, not the rank line alone. Our breakdown of what a veteran's service record tells you shows how the pieces fit together.

Where Do You Find Veterans to Run This On?

This whole method only matters if you have strong veteran candidates in front of you. That is the part most midsize companies struggle with. You are not a big defense prime with a built-in pipeline.

That is the gap Best Military Resume fills. The platform adds over 1,000 new veteran profiles every month, with 60,000 resumes built to date. That is a fresh, growing pool of veterans and transitioning service members. They have already translated their military work into civilian terms. The scope is right there on the resume, ready to match to a band.

You do not need a huge program to hire well from this group. You need a clean comp method and access to the talent. The method is in this guide. The talent pool is one step away.

Ready to reach veteran candidates whose scope already maps to your roles? Reach out to access BMR's veteran talent pool. Bring the band. We will bring the candidates.

Set the offer by the work, not the rank. Use your own bands. Validate with public data. Show total value, not base to base. Do that, and the comp question stops being the thing that costs you a great hire.