For years, companies and HR teams have used market data to benchmark employee equity. Salary benchmarking has become standard, yet startup employees have had almost no free sources for comparing their equity compensation with grants awarded to peers.
That creates an information gap. Companies make compensation decisions with market context, while employees often evaluate offers, promotions, and job changes without access to the same kind of data.
Choose your department, seniority level, and company stage. The Benchmark builds a cohort of comparable grants instead of returning a broad market median.It then converts each option grant into grant-date FMV using the company's FMV per share when the grant was issued. This creates a consistent comparison across companies with different option counts and share prices.
Build a specific cohort
Combine department, seniority, and company stage to compare like with like.
See more than a median
View P25, median, P75, average and sample size behind every result, so you know how much weight to give it.
Change one factor at a time
The Adjust seniority, department, or stage while holding the other two fixed to see what drives the difference.
A single data point can still be misleading if the cohort is too broad. At the IC level, the median engineering new-hire grant is 67% higher than marketing. By the VP and C-level, the gap has effectively disappeared.Seniority changes the comparison, and company stage can change it again. The useful question is not "What is the median grant?" but "What is typical for employees like me at companies like this?"
Once you have a relevant cohort, the data becomes useful in the moments when equity is part of a career decision:
Evaluating a new offer
See how your startup offer compares with verified grants for similar roles, seniority levels, and company stages
Promotion and refresh talks
See what employees typically receive when hired into the role you're moving into, or the role you already hold
Thinking about leaving?
See what similar employees receive when joining the companies you may consider next.
The benchmark is built from 9,000+ verified new-hire equity grants submitted through Equitybee. It provides market context based on Equitybee’s dataset and is intended for informational purposes only, not financial, tax, legal, or compensation advice. The dataset is derived exclusively from Equitybee’s platform data, has not been independently verified, and should not be interpreted as representative of grants that ultimately led to successful liquidity events. Data presented as is.