Pay equity in 30 days: the operator's playbook nobody publishes.

If you Google 'pay equity audit,' you'll find a hundred pages telling you to hire a consultant. That's because the people writing the pages are the consultants. The truth is uglier and more useful: a competent People + Finance team can run a defensible first-pass audit in 30 days, find the 80% of gaps that matter, and queue up remediation before the next compensation cycle.

Here's the playbook. It's not the gold-standard regression-on-everything version — that's a 90-day project with legal privilege. This is the version that catches the indefensible gaps before they become a lawsuit, a Glassdoor post, or a regulator's letter.

The 30-day plan, week by week

Week 1 — Get the data right

• Pull comp, role, level, location, tenure, gender, race, manager from HRIS into one flat file.
• Engage legal (in writing) under privilege before any analysis. This single email protects the work product.
• Define the 'similarly situated' bucket: same job family + same level + same country. Smaller buckets are noise.
• Decide your pay measure: base only, base + bonus, or total cash. Be consistent.

Week 2 — Run the unadjusted gap

• For each bucket, compute mean and median pay by gender and (where you have it) race.
• Flag any bucket where the gap exceeds 5% OR the bucket is too small to be statistically meaningful (n<10).
• Resist the urge to explain gaps away yet. Just list them.

Week 3 — Adjust for legitimate factors

• Add controls one at a time: level, tenure, performance rating, location.
• After each control, recompute. The 'adjusted gap' is what remains after legitimate explanations.
• Anything above ~2% adjusted gap is a real issue. Anything above 5% is urgent.

Week 4 — Remediate and document

• For each unjustified gap, propose a remediation amount that brings the person to the bucket's adjusted-fair midpoint.
• Bundle remediations into the next comp cycle when possible (cleaner narrative, less individual exposure).
• Document method, controls, decisions, and edge cases. This is what makes the audit defensible.
• Schedule the next audit for 6 months out. Pay equity is a maintenance discipline, not a project.

What I'd never do