Stacy L. Chin explains why founders pick arbitrary salaries like $2,000 a month for SBIR grants. Instead, use the Bureau of Labor Statistics website to find the median salary for your role and location, then anchor your budget to that defensible number.
They want to make $2,000 as a salary on this project, and then they write that down their application. But that's not how it works when you budget your salaries for SBIR grants. Your salary isn't based on what you want. It's based on what you can define. So here's actually how you give yourself a salary and put yourself in the SBIR budget. Step 1, go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and that's a publicly accessible website. First, find your role, your location, and then find your rate, and then hit that to the median percentile with someone of your right expertise. That's your anchor of your hourly rate that you can include in your SBIR application, and that's completely defensible.
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