Pay zones are unique to your company. If you don’t want to pay people differently based on where they live, or if all your employees live in the same location, we recommend 1 pay zone.
If you have employees in multiple US cities, we recommend up to 3 pay zones: 1 for notoriously expensive & talent-short US cities (i.e. NYC Metro, SF Bay Area, etc.), 1 for hot tech-talent cities (i.e. Austin, Denver, Boston), and one for other US cities. If you have teammates internationally, we typically recommend 1 pay zone per country, or groups of related countries (i.e. combining Sweden, Norway, Denmark & Finland into a consolidated “Nordics” pay region).
We rarely recommend having more than 5 pay zones for companies with fewer than 1,000 employees as explaining & managing dozens of pay zones becomes cumbersome.