Postings with a salary sit for a median of 22 days, those without for 27. A five-day gap is small, steady, and about as much as a crawler can honestly claim.
Only 12.4% of the postings in our corpus state any pay figure. That leaves a large group with a number and an even larger group without one, and one obvious question: do they behave the same way on the shelf?
They do not, but the difference is smaller than the argument around it.
Five days on a median of 27. About 25.7% of paid ads are still up after three months against 28.27% of silent ones. That is a real gap and a modest one, and both of those things are true at the same time.
The tempting sentence is "publishing pay makes you close roles faster". We cannot say that. Ads with a figure are also ads from employers with a functioning HR process, a salary band that already exists, and someone willing to be accountable for a number. Any of those could be doing the work. Whether the figure is the cause or just a marker of a company that has its act together is not something a crawl can settle.
There is also a selection problem in the other direction. The 12.4% that disclose are unusual by definition. Germany, where 0.47% of ads carry a figure, and the UK, at 24.36%, are not two versions of the same market with different habits. They hire differently, they post through different systems, and the legal pressure on them is not the same.
A job seeker reading this should take the narrow version. An ad that tells you the pay is slightly more likely to be a live search than one that tells you "competitive". The size of that advantage is a few days out of a month, which is not nothing and is not a strategy.
The stronger point is structural. Pay transparency gets argued about as if the only question were whether candidates deserve a number before the interview. The measurement suggests a second question, which is whether the ad can tell you anything at all before you spend an evening on an application. On that one, 12.4% is the whole story, and the gap between the two groups is a rounding error next to it.
→ Pay and listing age · Pay transparency
Our numbers below are ours; these are other people looking at the same question. We paraphrase and link, we do not quote.
Want a cut we have not published? A region, an industry, a role family, a time series, one country against another — we can pull it from the same corpus these posts are measured on.
Tell us what you are looking at: [email protected]. We answer either way.
Source & licence. All figures here come from our own crawl of public job postings, measured against the corpus published in the monthly report and its JSON (CC BY 4.0).
Cite as: DeUnemployment, “Ads that state pay do not linger as long”, https://deunemployment.com/blog/ads-that-state-pay-do-not-linger-as-long (data as of 2026-09-20).