Educate me On a Job-Hopping (Salary Range)

[Masashi Borges-Silva]

I need some help with the salary range expectation I have after some research is realistic or not.

The background of this story is the following:

* My background is in Mechanical Engineering

* 7 years experience in the current job (9 years total as an engineer)

* I live in NYC

* The current salary is $93k

A recruiter contacted me for a position as follows:

* The position is a senior engineer

* I owe the recruiter to give them my salary range expectation by tomorrow.

* I talked with the recruiter last Monday and I asked them for a time to do the research before I say anything on the spot.

So, I have been researching for an appropriate numbers and my market values. After some digging, I found the average pay for the position, experience, location, etc, the number seems to fall under around $106k.

This number seems to be reasonable to me as I am expecting a 10% to 20% increase from my current job ($93k) when I do the job-hopping. In fact, a 15% increase from the current pay is about $107k.

Then for the range, I thought maybe to start with $107k for the lower end of the range, and the higher range would be a 10% to 20 % increase from the lower end ($117k and $128k), so I would either have:

1. $107k to $117k (10 % range)

2. $107k to $128k (20 % range)

Is this reasonable? Having a range of $10k and $20k seems pretty tight? I haven't really done job-hopping in my career, so I don't have that much experience and expectations from an HR standpoint.

Also, I contacted some of the employees via LinkedIn, and after speaking to them, I am very excited to work for them as it seems a lot of my values and wants are checked off. They also shared me with some benefits package, and the benefit seems very generous. One of the employees told me that the average year for employees to stay with the company is 14 years.

What do you think about the salary range I am considering to offer them??