So it&apos;s pretty much the most prevalent question on the forum - some variant of "AM I PAID ENOUGH?" (and reading between the lines - "would I gain financially by changing employer?")Well the definitive answer is here - our 2007 salary report is published today, based on data contributed by a whopping 1,660 of you!! The PDF can be downloaded from the following URL (1.6MB - so download on a high-speed connection):<a href=http://www.top-consultant.com/2007_salary_report.pdf target=_blank>http://www.top-consultant.com/2007_salary_report.pdf</a>Your comments on last year&apos;s report were really helpful in making this year&apos;s even better, so do share here any thoughts on the findings. And to make the thread a bit more entertaining, are you staying put or job hunting now that you&apos;ve seen the results?!Tony RestellTop-Consultant.com

Excellent report - thank you Tony and the Top-Consultant team. It&apos;s invaluable to get these kind of fact-based insights from time to time. I also thought the report contains some really useful commentary about what&apos;s likely to happen in negotiations etc. (e.g. now I&apos;ll be making sure I get a guaranteed bonus if I switch employers)Regarding the findings: Well at first, I read the following line and thought "OK, so maybe I don&apos;t have such a bad deal after all" ---> "Pay rises averaged 6% for those that received a raise at all – and 26.5% of consultants received no raise over the course of the last year."I then saw the stats on page 8 about salaries and boy am I seriously underpaid.My head tells me I should switch employers ASAP. But, I&apos;ll be honest - I&apos;m scared. I fear the unknown. What I have isn&apos;t excellent, but it could be worse? Is the grass always greener? This report is serious food for thought for me. I think I need to start checking the job ads more often to find one which is a good match for me and which will fix my low salary. Why is it that employers always wait until you come to them with a resignation letter before offering to adjust your salary to what you&apos;re really worth (by which time the bridge is already burnt and off you go)???

The stats for partners at &apos;strategy&apos; firms surprised me a great deal.I know they are significantly more than that at MBB. Who is dragging down the average?

Anon - you&apos;re absolutely right. For the "industry average" figures I did highlight the fact that a minority of Partners do earn a multiple of the figures presented in the report - and within the strategy-specific figures the same would be true (though admittedly this wasn&apos;t flagged up on every subsequent page after the industry average page). Recently promoted partners at the strat houses and junior partners working in strategy practices at the mainstream consultancies would obviously both have far lower packages than the more senior partners at an MBBB firm. As would partners at smaller / start up type strat firms. So the average figure does mask the fact that there are some partners earning significantly more than this.It&apos;s probably also true that the participants in the survey were very representative at the ranks of Junior Consultant through to Principal - but at the Partner level we probably had a higher proportion of the more junior partners taking part in the survey than practice heads and the most senior partners.So fear not, £300k - £700k+ is attainable if you can make it right to the very very top of one of these firms!!Rgds,Tony RestellTop-Consultant.com

I&apos;d love to make that kind of salary if getting there didn&apos;t impinge too much on my personal life.However, when you think about the sacrifices a partner makes to make it to the top and earn that kind of salary, it makes you wonder - is it worth it? Gordy Brown takes 40% of it all anyway, and if you do choose to spend long hours in the office, why not spend them doing something that really does pay a lot (e.g. banking)?

I ask myself that all the time.Would i give up everything to get there and risk being alone by the time i did? Wondering where my youth went? My friends? the wife?Perhaps an exaggeration but in many cases actually true!My firm seems bang on industry avg which is fine though i wish the avg was double hehe.

Im really surprised by these results... given the constant &apos;im better than you&apos; spiel of the strategy consultants, they dont seem to be all that well paid for their additional &apos;intellectual horsepower&apos;.</br>Aside from that, really good work top-consultant. As always top of the pile!

A great report, and very interesting reading.It would also be useful to understand the contract market data.Do you plan to survey the contracting market?

I must admit, I am more impressed with the report than I ever imagined I would be.Nice work, TopConsultant, Tony and the crew.

Is there some kind of award we can enter this excellent work for? E.g. do the MCA have some kind of category in their annual awards that might be relevant? Good work like this deserves recognition. It&apos;s a service to us all - firms, grads, experienced hires, agencies and headhunters alike.My expectations were 5 out of 10. This report came in at 10 out of 10.

Guys and Gals, All the credit to Tony and his team - but please lets be realistic with the praise and not be airy about it. Tony is not doing this for charity - he&apos;s not doing this as a service to us - he and his team have made this a career and a successful company - which is great and we all like well run businesses and ideas. But this is not about phillanthrophic service to humanity. We should promote more competition here and better quality as that will make things even better. Im surprised i havent seen more &apos;top-consultant&apos; like sites.Good work - but 1600 responses is quite less frankly, I&apos;d expect 3 times that for more accurate interpretation. We review and crunch 100&apos;s of datapoints for a simple strategy project, so its not a huge ask to demand more from such surveys.

DoR - not sure when was the last time you read survey stats quoted in the national press, but usually YouGuv poll data and the like presented in the papers are based on less than 1,000 survey results. So too are the news pieces about the scale of City bonuses.From the range of salaries in each rank and sector in this report I&apos;m quite convinced that collecting 2-3 times more data points would have more or less no impact on the data presented. The senior partner level is the only area where I&apos;d have liked us to have had more data points - and I suspect most of these consultants would not choose to divulge their earnings even if we promoted the survey more widely or used phone interviewing to secure more data...Tony RestellTop-Consultant.com

It&apos;s precisely because the Topconsultant team go to these lengths that they&apos;ve been able to close out this market isn&apos;t it. Creates quite a barrier to entry if we already get all the stats and news we need from this site. Great work on this latest report gang! Jim

Can Anon or anyone else share via this forum the rough earnings of Partners in the MBBB firms. As that&apos;s the piece of info missing from the report, would be useful to get the collective view here on what the earnings potential truly is in these firms. Any insights or estimates much appreciated. Ryan

From around £400k for a new partner to £1m+ for an established partner

I believed it caps out at around £2-3m. Doesn&apos;t go much higher.

if that&apos;s not enough then you guys really are setting your sights high

Thanks to those who emailed in comments about the salary report while I was off on holiday this last week - and for the positive feedback you&apos;ve all provided.The main area for improvement that has been requested is for us to provide a breakdown of data by industry sector. Since many of you may have had the same thought, I wanted to state that we&apos;ve only provided data where it is statistically robust for us to have done so.Once you start analysing figures for Financial Services practitioners or Telecoms consultants, the figures are of no value unless you also further split the responses into type of consulting (eg. Telecoms strategy consulting will have vastly different remuneration rates to Telecoms IT consulting).At this level of granularity there simply aren&apos;t enough responses for every single level + industry + consulting type combination and so the results would potentially be highly misleading.That said, thanks for your suggestions and constructive feedback and I hope this report helps you all to make a more informed decision about the next steps you will take in your consulting careers.Tony RestellTop-Consultant.com

I noticed the point about counter-offers being more prevalent. Can anyone here share experience of having accepted a counter-offer? Do you find yourselves 6 months later still wanting to leave - and do the firm claw this gain back at the next salary review? Or is this a genuine gain to be made that can reinvigorate your career with your existing employer?Thoughts please?Matt

A counter-offer is just a means of the firm delaying your departure, they still view you on a par with your peers and your bonuses and progression through the firm will not be increased / accelerated by having fought for a rise. So it&apos;s just a one-off gain and I&apos;d imagine most that stay put and accept a counter-offer find this only buys them a few months of feeling more contented with life. Then the same old dissatisfactions set in and you&apos;ll soon be looking to move on...

I am a head-hunter. I have on several occasions received a call along the lines of "Mr X has just resigned, we have bought him back for a while, can you do the necessary please so that we do not get caught short...." I will not attempt to out stato any of you consultants but the vast majority of those who accept a counter offer end up leaving within a short space of time. If you have to resign to get what you deserve, you are at the wrong company. If you do not deserve the pay rise and the employer is just buying time, your days are certainly numbered. Flip side is though that you can market yourself out as a more senior/well paid profile down the line so all is not lost!!

When we last polled readers on this topic (earlier this year), it was clear that things like career progression, challenge of assignments and quality of work/life balance were key reasons for switching jobs. As a one-off pay rise doesn&apos;t do anything to address these points, you would have to think it&apos;s only a quick-fix that is not usually going to overcome the fundamental reasons that initially prompted that consultant to think about leaving in the first place. A pay rise is only beneficial until the time of the next promotion round / pay review. If you aren&apos;t then promoted at the pace you&apos;re aspiring to then the pay rise is going to be long forgotten and you&apos;ll be in job hunt mood again.My advice to candidates is to never accept a counter-offer; it&apos;s just prolonging the inevitableTony RestellTop-Consultant.com

How big are these pay rises people are moving for normally? If its a case of an extra 5 or 10k it&apos;s hardly going to make everything worth it, needs to be the points above that make a good job moove (interesting work and so on).

If you get a pay hike through moving firms, it&apos;s likely to be the equivalent of you securing your next promotion ahead of time. So whatever the next level up is at your firm - and the salary you&apos;d expect to get if you got that promotion immediately - that&apos;s what it&apos;s realistic to expect to secure through moving (though note not all moves secure a rise at all). Hence you probably are only looking at a potential uplift from moving of £5-10k...Tony RestellTop-Consultant.com

that&apos;s what makes moving so hard, a rise of only 5 - 10k (say 10% rise) may not be worth giving up benefits you have acrued with service current employer over many years such as more holidays longer notice periods, final salary pension etc

I kinda agree with this... I&apos;d rather put up with a medoicre job than leap into the unknown and &apos;risk it all&apos; (i.e. having to build new relationships, make your mark again, gain people&apos;s confidence etc) for an extra 5K.

Surely the starting point when discussing any package with a potential new employer is that the things you&apos;ve earnt over time at your previous employer are built into their offer too?! So if you&apos;ve worked your way up to 28 days of paid holiday entitlement then you&apos;d immediately insist on that being matched by the new employer. Anything less than this is just allowing yourself to be had.Look at the banking sector and people have been securing guaranteed bonuses in order to countenance a move from one employer to another. If the employers are facing a recruitment crunch, this is just the price they have to pay to be able to recruit new staff. Same must surely apply - albeit on a smaller scale - in consulting? If you&apos;ve got a package that includes perks you value like pension and holiday, that&apos;s incorporated in your new offer without question isn&apos;t it? At least in the current market.But assuming the above is realistic, how much of a raise would you need to secure before going through with a move? I&apos;d say £10-15k at the senior consultant level. The money itself is nice to have, but it&apos;s the difference in mortgage that you can secure that really makes this worthwhile for most Londoners isn&apos;t it? How much of a rise would you need to go through with a move?