Questions on justice of earnings are regularly fielded in large-scale surveys but insights into the role of response formats on measures of the justice of earnings are missing. This problem is illustrated by the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), which, in 2017, changed its question on the justice of one’s own earnings from a binary response scale to an 11-point scale. Meanwhile, the share of respondents evaluating their earnings as just dropped considerably, leaving unclear how methodological and substantive effects are intertwined. Addressing this gap, we analysed a survey experiment in the 2016 Innovation Sample of the SOEP (SOEP-IS). In …