You're waiting for a promotion.
Here's what the wait is costing you.
Calculated on the midpoint of your range. Nothing you enter is stored unless you ask us to email it.
THE COST
$2,300 a month
That's how much you're losing. It's your salary times a standard promotion increase, divided by twelve. Promotional increases average an additional 8 to 12% on top of merit.¹
You've been in role 2 to 3 years. The average time to a promotion at large companies is 30.4 months, and the average person is now 18 months past that.² If you'd been promoted on that timeline, you'd have earned about $73,200 more by now.
Give it 2 years more and you'll leave another $57,900 on the table. By the end of that wait, the promotion you didn't get is worth $29,500 a year, every year, because every future raise afterward compounds off whichever base you're on.³
The 2026 salary increase budget is 3.5%. That number already includes promotions.⁴ Managers don't allocate it to the most deserving. They allocate it to whoever's easiest to make the case for in the room.
Fewer than 1% of people stay past three years without a promotion.⁵ Most don't leave because they were passed over. They leave because nobody in the room could describe what they'd be promoted for.
Personal branding gets you likes. Career branding gets you named in rooms you're not in. Promotion calibrations are the rooms.
I'm Lianne Stewart, founder of The Narrative Office. I spent almost a decade at Meta shaping executive narratives that got repeated when they weren't in the room.