The Municipal Association of SC gives cities and towns an easy way to compare their employee compensation with pay from other municipalities across the state through its online compensation survey.
City and town leaders use this tool to save time when studying pay data to help inform decisions on how to set their compensation levels competitively. As a reference tool, the survey should only supplement those situations where a city or town needs to commission a full class and compensation study, and should not be a substitute for a study.
Users can now find the data from the 2024 Compensation Survey online, and can use it to generate customized reports, like narrowing the full survey results down to information for municipalities of a particular population range or specific job positions. Reports can also include the number of full-time employees or the annual payroll of a particular city or town. Other search functions include salary ranges, merit raise minimums or maximums, or the range of a cost-of-living adjustment. Users can also export all of the compensation survey data into Excel spreadsheets, or download the entire compensation survey report as a PDF.
Responding to the survey is voluntary for municipalities, but higher response rates increase the usefulness of the data. The Association requests survey participation from cities and towns at the beginning of each calendar year.