We read 6.6 million job ads and counted how many state a pay figure: 12.4%. In Germany 0.47%, in the UK 24.36%. Same internet, very different habits.
Pay transparency is one of those ideas everyone nods at. Recruiters say they support it, companies write it into their values pages, and the EU turned it into law. Then you open the ad and it says "competitive salary, DOE".
We counted instead of nodding. Of every job posting in our September 2026 edition (full pass, September 15, 2026), 12.4% state any pay at all. Any figure: a range, an amount, a band, a currency symbol with digits behind it. About one ad in eight.
The overall number hides the part I actually find interesting, which is how unevenly this is spread across the 82 countries our crawl covers.
The UK is at 24.36% and Germany at 0.47%. That is not a rounding difference, it is fifty times, and it has nothing to do with how easy it is to type a number into a job ad. Both countries hire nurses, engineers and warehouse staff. Both publish a lot of ads. One of them puts figures in them.
Part of that is habit. Staffing agencies state pay far more often than employers do: 19.4% of agency postings carry a figure, against 12.4% of everything. The UK has a large share of agency postings, so the UK average gets pulled up by recruiters doing what recruiters do.
Then there is the law, and this is where Germany gets awkward. The EU pay transparency directive (Directive (EU) 2023/970) had to be in national law by 7 June 2026. It requires employers to tell candidates what the pay is, at the latest before the interview. It does not require the figure to sit inside the job ad. Germany took that option and ran with it: 0.47% of German postings we measured state any pay. Switzerland is not in the EU and sits at 0.37%, which is an honest reminder that a directive is not the only thing going on here.
Disclosure is not the same as information.
A posting that says $80,000 to $170,000 has technically told you something. It has also told you that nobody in the hiring process wants to commit to a number, which is itself a data point about the company.
We count whether a figure is there and what shape it takes. We do not verify that the figure is real, and we could not if we tried: nothing outside the payroll system can confirm what a company intends to pay.
Which leaves the bigger hole. 12.4% disclose, so most ads tell us nothing about pay. That is not evidence that the silent ones pay badly. Silent and low are two different things, and the honest position is that we do not know which one we are looking at.
What we can say is what the market actually does, country by country, month by month. If you are job hunting in Germany, budget for a conversation about money, because the ad will not start it. If you are applying in the UK or the US, there is a decent chance the number is already in front of you, and the more useful question becomes whether the range means anything.
→ Pay transparency · Agencies vs direct employers
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, “Everyone says they want pay transparency. Almost nobody publishes pay.”, https://deunemployment.com/blog/everyone-says-they-want-pay-transparency (data as of 2026-09-20).