The salary expectations question is an interviewer's request for the compensation you are targeting, usually asked during a recruiter or HR screen. It is used to check budget alignment early and it anchors later negotiation. In a number of US states and cities employers may not ask about your salary history, though they can still ask what you expect.
What Salary Expectations Question means in practice
The question arrives in three shapes: what are your salary expectations, what were you earning previously, and here is our range, does that work. The first is standard, the second is restricted by salary history bans in states including California, Colorado, New York and Massachusetts, and the third is increasingly common where pay transparency laws require a posted range. Screens usually raise it in the first ten minutes, because recruiters do not want to run a five-stage process for someone 20,000 above budget. Answering with a researched range, or politely asking for the approved band once before answering, are both normal and well received.
Why it matters for candidates
Whatever number you say becomes the ceiling of the conversation more often than the floor, so an unprepared low figure is expensive and hard to recover. Refusing outright can stall an early screen, so the practical play is a researched range whose bottom you would genuinely accept. Knowing the local law helps too: where salary history is banned you can decline that specific question without any friction at all.
How to prepare
- Research the market range before any recruiter call.
- Give a range whose bottom number you would actually accept.
- Ask for the approved band first, once, and politely.
- Base your figure on market and scope, not your current pay.
- Know whether salary history questions are banned where you live.
Example
Eight minutes into a recruiter screen the question lands. The candidate says that based on the posted range and comparable roles in the city they are targeting 95,000 to 110,000 depending on scope and bonus, then asks what band the role is approved at. The recruiter confirms 90,000 to 105,000. The candidate says the top half of that works, and both sides continue knowing there is no dead end waiting at the offer stage.
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