How to use Carta Total Compensation in Claude

Carta Total Compensation (CTC) is available directly in Claude through the Carta MCP. HR admins and compensation teams can ask compensation questions in natural language, analyze employee scorecard data against market benchmarks, and export results — without leaving Claude or opening the CTC product UI.

To use CTC through Claude, you need:

An active Carta Total Compensation subscription — standalone CTC users are supported; a cap table subscription is not required.
Claude Desktop with the Carta Cap Table plugin connected — see Setting up Carta Plugins for setup instructions.
CTC access on your Carta account.

If your company doesn't have an active CTC subscription, Claude will show an upsell prompt when you trigger a compensation skill. Contact your Customer Success Manager or visit carta.com/demo/total-comp to request access.

What you can do

Benchmark lookups

Ask Claude for market compensation data (salary, equity, and total cash) for any role, level, and location. Benchmarks are drawn from Carta's private market dataset and reflect the version contracted for your company. Every response cites the version and release date — for example, "Data source: Carta Total Compensation Benchmarks released February 2026."

Example prompts

What should we pay a Senior Software Engineer in San Francisco?
Show me P25/P50/P75/P90 salary benchmarks for a VP of Engineering.
What are the equity benchmarks for a Staff Engineer at a Series B startup?
How does pay for a Senior PM in Austin compare to New York?

Role matching

Paste a job description or title and Claude will classify it into the CTC taxonomy — returning job area, focus, level, track, and a confidence score. This ensures consistent benchmarking inputs without manual taxonomy lookup.

Example prompts

What CTC job category does "Growth Engineer" map to?
Classify this role: "Leads a team of 6 engineers, owns the data platform roadmap, reports to VP Engineering."
What level and track is a "Staff Machine Learning Engineer"?
I have a CSV of 20 job titles — can you match them all to the CTC taxonomy?

Employee scorecard analysis

Claude can analyze your company's compensation scorecard against market benchmarks to identify employees who are above or below market — useful for retention planning, equity reviews, and budget requests.

Example prompts

Based on the scorecard, which employees are overpaid and underpaid, and by how much?
Show me all employees in the Engineering area with a LOW comp score.
Which employees are below the 50th percentile for their role?
Filter the scorecard to just Individual Contributors in Product.
Who has the lowest market equity ratio on our team?

Equity refresh planning

For employees flagged as significantly below market, Claude can identify who is due for an equity refresh grant and recommend adjustment amounts based on their current position relative to market benchmarks.

Example prompts

For employees significantly below market, when are they due for an equity refresh grant and how much should I adjust?
Show me the equity refresh planner.
Which employees are completing most of their vesting in the next 12 months?
Which employees are below their salary market target?

Export to CSV

Any benchmark results or scorecard analysis can be exported to a spreadsheet directly from Claude. The export includes the benchmark version and peer group used.

Example prompts

Export a spreadsheet of all employees below market.
Put all Sales and Marketing benchmarks for our company in a CSV.
Download the scorecard for all Engineering employees.
Export the full scorecard to CSV.

Peer group dimensions

Benchmarks are segmented by company stage. Each query operates within a single dimension, and Claude will help you pick the most relevant one for your company.

Dimension	Available ranges
Post-money valuation	$1M–$10M, $10M–$25M, $25M–$50M, $50M–$100M, $100M–$250M, $250M–$500M, $500M–$1B, $1B–$10B
Headcount	1–25, 25–100, 100–500, 500+
Cash raised	$1M–$10M, $10M–$25M, $25M–$50M, $50M–$100M, $100M–$200M, $200M+

What CTC in Claude doesn't do

CTC in Claude does not:

Write or modify compensation data — the integration is read-only. Salaries, bands, and equity cannot be updated through Claude.
Provide real-time market data — benchmarks reflect your contracted version, not live market fluctuations.
Cover board-level compensation — Chairperson, Board Director, and similar roles are outside the CTC benchmark dataset. Use external board compensation sources for these.
Generate salary negotiation coaching or offer letters.
Cover consultants or ex-employees — CTC benchmarks cover employees, founders, officers, and executives only.