Did Higher Pay Make Gravity Payments More Productive?

By a business reporter covering workforce productivity and compensation
Last reviewed: July 10, 2026

Gravity Payments says revenue per staff member doubled during the decade following its 2015 minimum-salary announcement. Two figures published in the same company report create a problem: revenue reportedly rose 650%, while headcount roughly doubled to more than 200 full-time employees. Under ordinary arithmetic, those figures imply that revenue per employee increased far more than twofold.

The discrepancy does not prove that Gravity’s productivity claim is false. It shows that the private payment processor has not published enough underlying data to reproduce it.

Gravity also uses “revenue per staffer” as its productivity measure. The Bureau of Labor Statistics uses a materially different definition: real output divided by hours worked. Revenue per employee can rise because of inflation, pricing, acquisitions, transaction volume, product mix or reduced staffing, none of which necessarily means each hour of work became equally more productive.

The three published numbers do not reconcile

Gravity’s November 2025 report, 10 Years Later: How a $70k Minimum Wage Changed Gravity Payments, makes three workforce and business claims:

• Revenue increased 650% after the salary policy was enacted.
• Headcount roughly doubled to more than 200 full-time employees.
• Revenue per staff member doubled.

All three cannot be combined mechanically using the same starting date, ending date and workforce definition.

A 650% revenue increase normally means final revenue is 7.5 times the original amount. Dividing 7.5 by a doubled workforce produces revenue per employee equal to 3.75 times its original level, or a 275% increase.

Even under the less conventional interpretation that revenue reached 650% of its original level, final revenue would be 6.5 times the baseline. Dividing that by two produces a 3.25-fold productivity measure, not a doubling.

Calculations use the figures in Gravity Payments’ 2025 anniversary report. Because the company says headcount “roughly” doubled, the result is not exact. The difference is too large to be explained by ordinary rounding alone.

For revenue per employee to double while revenue increased 650%, headcount would need to rise approximately 3.75 times under the conventional interpretation. Gravity instead reports a workforce increase of roughly twofold.

Different endpoints may have been used. So might different employee counts.

The core contradiction

Gravity may be comparing annual revenue with average staffing in one calculation and year-end staffing in another. Acquired operations may also be treated differently. The report never says.

A 2020 checkpoint produces a more plausible result

An older company article supplies an intermediate point.

In an April 2020 post later updated in July 2023, Gravity said revenue had tripled during the five years following its wage announcement. Headcount and the customer base had both doubled. Those figures imply a 50% increase in revenue per employee because three times the revenue divided by twice the workforce equals 1.5 times the original ratio.

That result does not conflict with the later claim that revenue per staff member doubled over a full decade. Productivity could have risen 50% during the first five years and reached 100% growth during the following five.

The 2020 and 2025 revenue claims create another question. Gravity reported that revenue had tripled by 2020 and increased 650% by 2025. Under a conventional reading, revenue grew from three times the 2015 level to 7.5 times that level during the next five years, representing an additional 150% increase from the 2020 base.

Gravity does not publish the annual revenue figures needed to test that trajectory. Nor does it disclose whether the 2017 Boise acquisition, new financing products, software offerings or other business lines are included consistently across the series.

The broad direction is credible. The exact scale is not reproducible.

What BLS productivity data actually measures

BLS defines labor productivity as real output divided by total hours worked. Its calculation adjusts output for price changes and includes the hours of employees, proprietors and unpaid family workers where applicable.

Gravity’s measure uses revenue divided by staff count.

This difference is substantial. Suppose a processor raises its prices by 10% while serving exactly the same merchants with the same workforce and working hours. Revenue per employee could increase 10%, even though real output per hour had not changed.

Transaction values can create a similar effect. A processor may earn more when merchants process larger payments, even if employees perform the same amount of work. New software, automation or customer concentration could raise both revenue and real efficiency, but Gravity supplies no breakdown separating those effects.

Revenue per employee is a useful business ratio. Calling it labor productivity without qualification gives it more economic meaning than the public data supports.

How Gravity’s claimed growth compares with BLS benchmarks

Doubling over 10 years represents compound growth of approximately 7.2% per year. That is the annualized rate implied by Gravity’s stated twofold increase in revenue per staff member from roughly 2015 through 2025.

BLS reported that nonfarm business labor productivity increased 2.2% during 2025. Output grew 2.6%, while hours worked increased 0.4%. Hourly compensation rose 4.1%, and inflation-adjusted hourly compensation increased 1.4%.

Washington, Gravity’s home state, recorded 3.5% annualized productivity growth from 2019 through 2025, compared with 2.0% nationally. Washington also had the country’s highest long-term state productivity growth from 2007 through 2025 at 3.0% per year.

Sources: Gravity Payments’ 2025 report and BLS productivity releases. The Gravity measure is nominal revenue per employee, while the BLS figures measure real output per hour, so the rates are contextual rather than directly comparable.

If Gravity’s twofold claim is accurate, its revenue-per-worker ratio grew much faster than broad state and national labor productivity. Yet part of that difference may come from the use of nominal revenue, acquisitions and an employee count instead of real output and working hours.

Did employees share in the reported productivity gain?

Gravity’s original salary floor was $70,000. The company raised it to $80,000 in March 2022, a nominal increase of 14.3%. In 2024, it says workers received more than $8,000 each through profit sharing, bringing minimum compensation for that year above $88,000.

An $88,000 total is 25.7% above the original $70,000 figure. Both increases remain much smaller than the reported 100% increase in revenue per employee.

That comparison is incomplete.

The $70,000 policy was a floor, not Gravity’s average or median salary. The company said in its 2020 article that median salary was approximately $100,000 at that time. It has not published a comparable 2025 median dollar figure, total payroll, average compensation or labor share of revenue.

Gravity also reports that employee retirement contributions rose from an annual average of $1,900 in 2015 to $6,700 by 2025. Participation reportedly increased from 62% to 84%, and the company contributes 3% of employee pay whether or not the worker contributes. Those figures indicate improved retirement saving but do not establish how much of the productivity gain flowed into employer-paid compensation.

Profit sharing gives workers a direct claim on some business improvement. Gravity says the plan paid $1,000 per employee in 2023 and more than $8,000 in 2024, with larger amounts for longer-tenured workers. The formula uses company growth and actual profit, but no audited profit figure or final 2025 payment appears in the report.

The available evidence shows that compensation improved. It does not reveal the percentage of additional revenue allocated to labor.

Seattle compensation growth provides local context

BLS reported that private-industry compensation costs in the Seattle-Tacoma area increased 3.3% during the 12 months ending in March 2026. Wages and salaries rose 2.8%. National private-industry compensation increased 3.4% over the same period.

A year earlier, Seattle compensation had risen 5.8%, according to the same BLS series. The slowdown illustrates why a fixed $80,000 floor can remain stable while its position relative to the local market changes.

Across the United States, real average hourly earnings fell 0.8% between May 2025 and May 2026. Inflation exceeded the growth in average hourly earnings during that period.

Gravity does not disclose a regular annual adjustment tied to inflation, regional compensation costs or productivity. Its profit-sharing plan provides a variable mechanism, but the base floor remained $80,000 in the reviewed 2025 and 2026 materials.

Where the productivity headline misleads

Gravity writes that higher pay produced more engaged employees, stronger service, longer customer relationships and higher revenue. Its report says customers stay more than twice as long as the industry average and that customer attrition is less than half the industry average. No named industry benchmark, customer cohort or retention formula accompanies those comparisons.

The company also reports ten times more job applicants, turnover falling from 22% to 6%, and savings on advertising, recruitment and training. It provides no applicant totals or dollar amount for those savings.

Lower turnover can raise productivity. Experienced employees require less replacement training, retain account knowledge and may resolve problems faster. A high salary floor can contribute to that outcome.

Other factors remain in play. Gravity acquired a 49-person Boise company in 2017, moved into new products, provided financing to more than 1,000 businesses and became remote-first in 2020. Each change could affect revenue and staffing independently of the wage policy.

My interpretation is that Gravity has presented a credible business-growth narrative but not a productivity study. The report identifies correlation, proposes a mechanism and supplies several endpoints. It does not publish a consistent annual dataset or isolate the wage policy from acquisitions, pricing, product expansion and market growth.

What Gravity would need to publish

A reproducible productivity claim would require annual revenue in current and inflation-adjusted dollars, average full-time-equivalent employment, total hours worked and a consistent list of included business units.

It would also need annual payroll, benefit costs, profit-sharing payments and customer volume. Those figures would permit readers to distinguish higher prices from higher output and to calculate how gains were divided among labor, operating costs and profit.

Gravity publishes none of that series.

The company is private and has no SEC obligation to provide it. The consequence is narrower: “revenue per staffer doubled” should be treated as a company-reported ratio, not an independently verified measure of labor productivity.

FAQ

Does Gravity Payments say employee productivity doubled?

Yes. Its 2025 anniversary report says productivity, measured as revenue per staff member, doubled after the minimum-salary policy was introduced.

Why do Gravity’s revenue and headcount figures conflict with that claim?

A 650% revenue increase combined with a workforce that roughly doubled would ordinarily produce more than a threefold increase in revenue per employee. Gravity does not explain the difference in definitions or measurement periods.

Is revenue per employee the same as labor productivity?

No. BLS defines labor productivity as inflation-adjusted real output divided by hours worked. Revenue per employee uses nominal business revenue and a worker count.

How fast did Gravity’s reported productivity grow annually?

A doubling over 10 years equals approximately 7.2% compound annual growth. That calculation uses Gravity’s reported endpoint rather than independently verified annual data.

Did Gravity Payments raise salaries as productivity increased?

The company increased its salary floor from $70,000 to $80,000 in March 2022 and added profit sharing. Workers reportedly received more than $8,000 each in 2024.

Does Gravity publish its annual revenue?

No complete annual revenue series was found. The company publishes percentage growth but not the starting revenue, ending revenue or year-by-year amounts needed to verify its calculations.

Did higher wages cause Gravity’s growth?

The public evidence does not establish causation. Higher wages coincided with reported gains in revenue, retention and customer growth, while acquisitions, new products, publicity and wider payments-market changes also occurred.

Gravity may have achieved exceptional productivity growth, but its own headline figures point to different answers. Until annual revenue and staffing data are published under consistent definitions, the safest conclusion is that revenue per employee rose substantially, while the exact increase remains unresolved.