sliding scale

1. 1.

   a wage scale that fluctuates in response to the cost-of-living index

   Broaderwage scale

Questions about sliding scale

What does sliding scale mean?

sliding scale means "a wage scale that fluctuates in response to the cost-of-living index".

Is sliding scale a common word?

sliding scale is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.