Pay Transparency Is Rising Across the EU, Led by Employers Who Didn’t Wait for the Law

• The EU Pay Transparency Directive requires employers to inform candidates of the expected pay before the interview. It entered into force in June 2023 and had its national transposition deadline in June 2026. Employers did not wait for the EU legislation to become national law: the share of EU job postings with a salary range has risen from 2% in early 2022 to about 30% today, with much of the increase coming before national laws were in place.

• Today, only 7 of 27 member states have transposed the directive into national law. Disclosure picked up around the June 2026 transposition deadline, most clearly in Italy, where a national posting requirement law took effect. Disclosure also picked up in some countries that did not announce a new law.

• Differences across countries mostly reflect how each country words its law and when pay is set in the hiring process. In countries where wages are negotiated individually after a job offer is accepted or through collective bargaining agreements, employers post wide ranges or no pay at all.

The EU Pay Transparency Directive gave member states until 7 June 2026 to write its requirements into national law (transposition deadline). Four months later, only seven of 27 have done so; most have a draft or nothing, and the countries that did transpose wrote very different rules from one another.

That makes the Directive a useful natural experiment. Every member state faces the same EU rule and the same deadline, but each one writes its own version: some require pay in the job ad, others only before the interview, and some have not acted at all. Comparing countries allows us to understand how much the wording of a law and the way wages are set locally change what job seekers actually get to see. This week we teamed up with Syndio to look at how employers responded to the law (Syndio’s take on what it means for compensation teams is here). Using Revelio Labs job postings data, we track the share of postings that include a salary range in each EU country and compare the EU to the US and the UK.

In January 2022, just 2.1% of EU job postings included a salary range, compared with 35% in the UK and 26% in the US. By August 2026, the EU share had reached 30.4%, and the gap to the UK had narrowed from 33 to 17 percentage points. The timing matters: the rise began in late 2022 and accelerated through 2023 and 2024, years before the transposition deadline. The Directive entered into force in June 2023, but it obliged no employer to do anything until a national law said so.

EU Pay Transparency Directive Transposition: Where Member States Stand

Pay transparency compliance in EU countries went up even before the EU directive was adopted in 2023 while it was still in discussion. Why would an employer post pay voluntarily at all? Large multi-national employers that are required to post wages in postings in other jurisdictions they operate in may start posting wages on all their postings in anticipation. Once some well-paying employers advertise their salaries, silence starts to carry information: a candidate who sees no number assumes it is not a flattering one. That pushes the next-best payers to disclose, and so on down the line. In theory, disclosure unravels all the way to the bottom; in practice it stalls where candidates do not draw the inference, or where the employer simply does not have a number to post. Both of those frictions vary a lot across European countries.

The EU average hides large differences across countries. In September 2026, 59% of Dutch postings included a salary range, despite the Netherlands having no transposition law in force. Among the largest economies, France was at 43%, Italy 48%, Germany 20%, Spain 19%, Poland 4%, and Sweden 2%. Italy is the only one of these seven countries with a law in force that requires pay in the advert itself, and it took effect on 7 June. The Italian share went from 28.6% in April to 34.8% in May, 44.8% in June, and 48.0% in September: a clear policy effect, with some employers moving early in anticipation. The more surprising pattern is that June was a big month almost everywhere. France jumped from 32.1% to 41.4%, the Netherlands from 53.8% to 58.3%, and Spain from 11.9% to 15.9%, none of them under a new legal obligation. Our read is that the deadline worked as a focal point. Multinational employers do not want to run 27 different posting policies, so many picked the EU-wide date as their own switch date, regardless of what each national parliament had passed.

Where a law does exist, its wording decides the outcome. Poland's law has been in force since December 2025, but it lets employers choose to disclose pay in the advert, before the interview, or before the contract is signed. Polish employers overwhelmingly chose not to use the advert, and the share of postings with a range has stayed stuck at around 5%. Every one of those employers is compliant. The Polish case is a useful reminder that counting how many countries have transposed the Directive tells you very little about how much pay transparency job seekers will actually see. The margin that matters is whether the law says "in the advert" or "at some point before hiring."

How Wage Setting and Collective Bargaining Affect Salary Disclosure in Europe

The ranges employers post also say something about how pay is set. Among postings that disclose pay since June 2026, the average Swedish range runs from $45,000 to $67,000, a top that is 49% above the bottom. Poland's ranges are similarly wide, with the top 42% above the bottom. At the other end, German and Spanish ranges are much tighter, at 28% and 27%. A wide range is what you post when you have not really decided on the price. In Sweden, most workers are covered by collective agreements, but a large share of those agreements leave the individual wage to be set locally between manager and hire, often after the offer is accepted. When the advert is written, there is no single number yet. Posting a $22,000-wide band conveys very little to candidates, which is probably why so few Swedish employers bother.

The scatter plot below corroborates our intuition: the wider the ranges employers post, the less likely they are to post pay at all. Sweden and Poland, the two countries with the widest ranges, are also the two where employers are least likely to post pay (correlation = -0.41).

Posting a range is cheap when the employer already knows what the job pays. It is expensive when the wage is the outcome of a negotiation, because a posted range commits the employer to a band it then has to defend and hands the candidate an anchor before bargaining starts. Germany shows a related version of the same mechanism: many German postings state that pay follows the applicable collective agreement rather than printing a figure.

Social norms around money probably play a role as well. Cross-cultural research distinguishes "tight" societies, with strong norms and little tolerance for deviation, from "loose" ones (Gelfand et al., 2011). Employers in tight cultures are expected to wait for a rule and then follow it to the letter, while those in loose cultures respond to market pressure with or without one. Italy's jump once its law took effect, and the Netherlands' steady climb without any law, fit that story, but with so few countries it remains a hypothesis rather than a finding.

The next test comes soon. Greece's posting mandate takes effect on 1 November 2026, and like Italy's, it requires pay in the advert. If the wording of the law matters most, Greek postings should move the way Italian ones did. And once Germany or France requires pay in the advert, we would expect them to look a lot more like Italy than like Poland.

This matters for how to read the next year of transposition news. The Directive will raise posted pay the most in countries where wages are already a number when the ad is written, and where the law insists on the advert. In countries with negotiated or locally bargained pay, expect compliance to take the form of "salary according to collective agreement" or disclosure before the interview. Candidates still get the information, but it will not show up in job postings. For employers, the job posting is only the visible part of the Directive; the harder work is making sure the ranges they advertise are ones they can defend to the people already in those jobs, which is where Syndio's companion piece picks up. We will keep tracking postings country by country as the remaining member states transpose, starting with Greece in November.