I have always felt that job ads should include salary information. The main reason is not to waste anyone's time. Often a narrow salary range or a clear link between requirements and salary are much more informative than a job description. I have experienced to apply to a job opening and go through one or more interviews only to find out that the company is actually hiring for a more junior position than the ad copy implied.
A second reason is to avoid discrimination. Applicants that feel disadvantaged, even if they are actually qualified, may hesitate to negotiate for a higher salary in the same way that a other applicants would. The consequence is that they start with a lower salary. This applies specially to women. Plenty of research shows that they are less likely to negotiate their salary.
Research[1] suggests that pay transparency leads to lower average salaries because employers avoid paying higher wages to any one employee to avoid costly negotiations with others. The effect is small, around 2%, and it disappears with increasing degree of unionization. In my opinion this is an acceptable price to pay to reduce pay inequality, which often is much more than 2%. It is also a good argument for joining a union.
That said I think Jury is still out on pay transparency mostly because there isn't that much practical data. The EU has been navigating it for a few years but research is still ongoing.
One paper (which is more focused on pay gap reporting, which is longer implemented and seems to have limited impact) suggests salary disclosure in job ads actually increases wages.
It's definitely obvious that internal salary transparency will a) act to normalise salaries over the long term and b) generally depress salaries. But disclosure at the job as stage is less clear.
About 30% of modern economics is dubious studies that demonstrate that things which hammer profits are Bad For The Little Guy.
See also: hiking the minimum wage (possibly the most obvious example of academic corruption), rent controls, taxing the rich, etc.
There are a number of reasons for this, but the primary ones are 1) economists also respond to incentives and those think tank jobs pay really well and 2) prestige in the industry is also a commodity - a commodity which can be bought and sold. The level to which money talks in this industry is reflected by the wages - always higher than all other humanities.
As an example the freakonomics guys popularity are to popular economics what k pop is to music: a slick, highly refined, marketed product from a superbly well oiled marketing machine.
My point is that we should be able to distinguish between the studies that are dubious and the studies that are solid but go against out assumptions. And if our assumptions are that that economists are just protecting corporations, we'll end up rejecting claims that might be true, and end up with policies that sound like they protect the little guy but are actually harmful.
My first question to any recruiter is now always "what's the salary range for this role?" precisely because I've run into your first point earlier in my career. I'm not even particularly salary-driven (doing interesting, valuable work is far more important!) but it's the best indicator that the role is pitched at the right level for me.
From an employer's point of view, there's also the avoidance of future unpleasantness if (or, rather, when) it comes to light that some staff are paid significantly less than their peers.
Responsible employers don't need mandatory salary disclosures to do the right thing here but, sadly, not all employers are responsible so this sets a common baseline and ensures everyone plays by the same rules.
After a bitter experience early in my career I _never_ “negotiate” the salary. When that conversation comes up I ask for the range they have for the position. If they are not willing to give that, it’s a huge red flag for me. It means that either the company _doesn’t have a range_, or they’re hellbent on hiring the cheapest person for the job. In both cases I don’t want to work there anyway.
>In my opinion this is an acceptable price to pay to reduce pay inequality, which often is much more than 2%. It is also a good argument for joining a union.
A company has a fixed amount of money it can spend on wages. Reducing wage inequality means paying less to the best employees and more to the others, which is great if you just want to slack off but terrible if you're already one of the highest paid employees.
That theory rests on the assumption that your salary is based on how good you are at your job. But if that were the case then corporate life wouldn't be full of people complaining "my boss is an idiot and yet (s)he makes ten times what I do".
I'll argue that money goes to those who are best at internal politics, with perhaps a moderate correlation with work performance.
> perhaps a moderate correlation with work performance
The only time I have seen a correlation greater than 0 is where bonuses where directly linked to earnings or sales ... even then the correlation was not 1
I'm pro salary transparency, but both things are true and OP should not be downvoted:
- Some employee salary discrepancies are inefficiencies due to humans sucking at rationally evaluating other people
- Some employee salary discrepancies are legitimate outcomes of value produced relative to other employees
The problem is the more we create policy assuming the first one is true, we eliminate everyone in the second category (however small or large that category), making the economy less efficient. I would argue pay transparency isn't one of those policies however, and in fact would lead to more efficiencies.
That said, all interventions have consequences, and less growth and higher inefficiency from cutting tall poppies is indeed a risk. As someone in Europe, our total lack of productivity growth is leading to collapsing governments and underwater social entitlement systems. These are serious issues that should be discussed and not dismissed outright with downvotes.
Now you've permanently handed power to employers to claim every year is "a tough year" and pay people less, while tricking people into taking jobs under the pretense of "the salary is low you usually get a crazy big bonus!"
How well correlated are the highest paid employees to the best employees, though? My guess would be that salary correlates strongly with self-belief, charisma, and negotiation skills
This is the lump of labour fallacy, right? Companies don't actually have to have fixed labour budgets; indeed ideally firms should be always willing to hire/retain a worker at a salary less than that workers marginal revenue product, as this is profit maximising.
Companies can decide to do it however they want. They don't have to conform to a platonic ideal of a bureaucracy. A company expecting to grow its market share will give it's managers more leeway than one that's under financial difficulties.
What can happen, which is why you may have seen budget constraints prevent profit-maximising hiring, is that the finance dept is operating off older information than the managers in business units (or just is crosswise with them for any reason at all). You can definitely get a situation in which managers can't get approval to do profit maximising hires, but this isn't inevitable.
Imagining this problem is just a sign that your company can't do pay grades or job titles properly. Or work out the concept called a "bonus".
The thing is, if you're rewarding performance through _process_ it ends up being more public and you have to have a written justification for it. Not just favouritism.
These very much tend to strongly correlate. You're definitely more confident in negotiating and counter-offering if you have 10x skill as your leverage.
That’s not at all the case. Five of us recently moved internally via a remapping and they gave us pay rises. I negotiated 15% more than the initial offer, everyone else took the initial offer. Roughly same ability.
Indeed the only reason I could do this was because the new salary ranges were shown thanks to pay transparency.
Feels like a law requiring prices on shop shelves. Isn't it self interest to put the salary in the ad? So much saved time. And probably more suitable applicants. I don't apply for a job without knowing the salary. Or via recruiters that tell you upfront (they usually do).
Cautiously pleased about this. Some companies in UK pay senior devs £30-35k. And some companies won't discuss that until v late in the process, while importing US-style multiround interviews. It's pretty silly when people get 3 rounds in, take time off work for the interviews, then find out their expectations are so far apart.
It is within your power as a job applicant to ask the salary range in the first phone call.
It is your fault if you allow the recruiting process to get to the third interview without at least knowing if the salary range is acceptable.
If you lack confidence in talking money, here is what you say:
"I'm looking for $120K to $130K. Before we get further into the process I want to confirm that this salary range is what would be discussed if we get to an offer."
You might add:
"$120K is my minimum but I am really hoping to find a role at the higher end - $130K is what I'm aiming for, depending on the job."
If, after saying all this, you get lowballed, then you have good reason to be very annoyed, and express calmly but clearly that you have had your minimum salary on the table since the first phone call." At that point you withdraw from the process and go look for a job with a professional company.
From the article, this self disclosure of range is part of the problem. People who have been given lower salaries in the past for discriminatory reasons may well low ball themselves if they offer up the range.
This sounds great in theory. I've had a ranges that was very healthy on application, gone through a lengthy process including showing work examples and meeting the team to be offered below the bottom of the original offer - "We feel like this is a good starting sallary, we will review it in 6 months" - "The company has changed its investment direction so this is a revised number" - "We've created a new role that better fits your needs" etc etc...
This law will force them to actaully stick to a number.
I have never applied to a job in the UK (or in USA), and wonder why you are being voted down. Is that not an appropriate question? Or will the employers and hiring managers not give answers?
They more than likely will not answer or will dodge the question entirely. This is so ubiquitous that if you decided to only go through processes that do answer this question, you might not get anything at all. In many cases when they do answer, it is a bold lie; and if challenged "who told you that range?", "well if you hit certain performance parameters by year three your total package may be x...", "that's for the senior position, we are offering you the standard position".
Do your due diligence and research companies that behave in this manner via platforms like Glassdoor. AI makes this process much easier. And always publicly call out companies that do this instead of sucking up.
You will basically have to be willing to walk away to get an answer other than "tell me what you're looking for and we'll let you know if you're in our range", which basically loses the negotiation. Most people are not comfortable doing that.
Also, large parts of the UK culturally have difficulty talking about money. (Exceptions are Yorkshire, which is proud of it's difference here, and (parts of?) Scotland). That's not going to change overnight, so making disclosure a legal requirement is a fair solution.
I'm in the UK and always ask about salary range and if the role is remote before I agree to do an initial interview. It saves everyone involved from having their time wasted. The first contact is usually a recruiter though, I don't mention pay and benefits in interviews.
It isn't uncommon to be given an acceptable figure, go through several rounds of interviews and end up with job offer but with a lower salary than initially agreed because the recruiter padded the numbers.
> You will basically have to be willing to walk away to get an answer other than "tell me what you're looking for and we'll let you know if you're in our range", which basically loses the negotiation.
No, it doesn't lose the negotiation. What makes you think so? Setting anchors and controlling the document is very powerful.
But yes, you need to know what you can get, and you need to be able and willing to walk away.
The suggestion that it's OP's/the candidate's fault jarred me a little. In my experience this is such a common situation in the UK that you could be jobless for much longer if you insist on early salary disclosure.
> I'm looking for $120K to $130K. Before we get further into the process I want to confirm that this salary range is what would be discussed if we get to an offer.
> It is within your power as a job applicant to ask the salary range in the first phone call.
For me, being fresh out of university, I didn't really think to press on salary too much and was just happy to land a job. In my first job, I recall not knowing the salary until I got the contract and offer (luckily, it was surprisingly above average pay).
When I moved into the software industry, I started to realise my worth a bit more and job-hopped for 10-50% pay bumps on an annual basis for the first few years and just started chasing higher salaries and turning down interviews unless they were in my desired range.
I know many other engineers who never changed this behaviour (or were never taught to be more ruthless and know their worth) and were just happy to receive any increase in salary - and as a result had 10+ years in the industry and had utterly pitiful salaries due to their employer simply taking advantage - you'll never receive the same increase in pay by remaining loyal to a company versus job hopping. I'm not sure if it's a cultural thing in the UK or what but this is the type of advice that should be given in schools more IMO.
Yeah, this is my experience too, trading up every couple of years (though sometimes I've taken a sideways or slight downwards step to broaden my experience or work for somewhere that I thought was interesting or worthwhile). I've had a couple of longish spells at companies, 7 or 8 years, and in both those cases I left because my pay wasn't keeping pace with the market or my growing responsibilities and management wouldn't budge. The irony being that at those places i was at my most valuable because of my institutional and political knowledge. I think companies greatly undervalue the benefits of long term employees.
Same here. You don't even know what you're worth if you keep working at the same company. And even then, if you don't know what you could ask, you will never know how much you're really worth.
Let's say you could command 100k/year but your first job is 30k/year and stay there for several years because you like the work environment. Then you'd go to the next company and ask for, I dunno, maybe 50k/year and think that's a huge bump. If you saw salary ranges for similar positions elsewhere you'd be more inclined to start looking around even if you were happy at your current employer.
Nowadays things are a bit more transparent in the tech world with stuff like levels.fyi (but you have to know about those), but I'm thinking it would benefit people in all fields.
> It is within your power as a job applicant to ask the salary range in the first phone call.
Sure, but the first phone call happens after you have already spent potentially hours putting together a tailored resume, cover letter, and 3 creative writing prompts about how you resolved a conflict with a coworker.
That's a pretty bad comparison. You aren't agreeing to work without knowing your pay. It's more like looking at a house before you know it's price.
Depending on your circumstances, that might be reasonable. If most people aren't quoting pay ranges and you need a job, not applying because of that isn't very smart.
I would make sure I knew the pay range before going through all the interview rounds, but not sending your CV in sounds too limiting to me.
> The European Union adopted pay transparency rules the following year, giving member states until June 2026 to implement them in national law.
That's the first I've heard of it, and I've seen plenty of job postings the past year for European companies where there was no salary indication. See for example the recent HN Who's Hiring? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50338728
Apparently, in France, the bill is not yet ready, and given the current state of legislative process, I don't think it's going to be ever voted before the next elections.
Again, member states miss European deadlines, but since it has no practical consequences, I don't see a why they would do it differently.
Yes, companies indeed break the law all the time. Most of the time, nobody with any power gives a fuck, and in the rare cases where they do, the consequences tend to be comfortably inside the “cost of doing business” range.
Besides ‘salary disclosure’, one other law that really helps improve salary is to ban potential employers from asking candidates’ current/previous salary. This avoids potential employers from offering just marginally better than candidates previous roles…
I got this once. I was equivocating, and then the guy was like, well, you're gonna give us your P60 when you join anyway, so you might as well tell me.
I was like, okay, fair enough.
I played it completely wrong though. I should have just reframed it and said, well, I paid this, but you're not competing against my current employer, you're competing against Meta, who I'm also interviewing with this week.
Yep, the advice I always give people for this question is to respond:
"My current salary is xyz, but I'm currently interviewing with several companies, so my salary expectations are tied to what I'm worth in the market, not my current pay. My specific ask will change as interviews progress"
i don't know what a P60 is, but you are unlikely required to give them anything except background checks and proof of qualifications until the salary is decided and the contract is signed.
A candidate can just make up whatever number they want to respond though. Most candidates I interview usually say what they want to get, not the real number.
i'd also like to ban asking for a salary expectation. it puts you in a very weak bargaining position. also my expectation depends very much on the type of work i'll be doing. i'll accept a lower salary for a good job and work environment, but i won't know that until after some interviews.
There are all kinds of reforms needed in that space; like whether a position is eligible for internal hire or not, requiring that a job posting must lead to someone being hired, making it illegal for jobs to be posted on fake foreign job sites in order to claim no native job demand exists as justification to import foreign labor, requiring a 100% visa employment tax on the fully burdened rate, making all executive bonuses taxable at 100% for any company that hires Visa/foreign labor, etc.
The only real reason companies don’t want to put salary ranges on job adverts is that it triggers difficult conversations with staff they have been taking advantage of.
There's multiple reasons companies don't want to publish salaries, but they almost all boil down to wanting to pay people as little as they can get away with
No, but people will just assume the actual pay is £20k and decide whether to apply for it on that basis.
As an employer that ruins one of the classic ruses that has been going on for a while: take someone through multiple interviews and then lowball the candidate who seems the most desperate.
If you believe in free market economics I think we can expect this to be a mess for a little while and then within a year or two it gets relatively efficient at dealing with the inefficiencies it’s targeting: younger people just not wanting to play the bullshit game where employers dangle generous starting offers, and then rug pull them to 2/3rds of that number; and to fix the gender pay gap (and the smaller reaching ethnicity pay gap).
What do you think the fix to the gender pay gap is relevant to this conversation?
There is no gender pay gap in 20s, 30s with several areas now favouring women. The mean pay gap is entirely due to the percentage of women in their 40s+ taking time off work for motherhood.
Demonstrably not true. One of the drivers of the legislation is to reduce the number of employment tribunals brought about for cases of pay discrimination where the overwhelming evidence is that women are paid less than men at every level of expertise and age.
We have the data on the average hours women work, it's ~1mo/yr less. We also know the pay gap, its 1mo/yr. The effect due to differential pay is a rounding error.
We can also do the simulation trivially using empirical data, women on average in the UK have 2 children, and take four years out of work to have them, and when in work, work for 9 years part-time. That creates a theoretical paygap of 20% on a 40 year career across male/female populations
The claim that the economy sustains a free markdown on 50% of the population's labour is mad. What force of nature is keeping a mass of businesses forming just hiring this cheap labour? Why arent there businesses booming hiring, en mass, women?
Either way, aside from that madness. The effect is, to a significant figure, entirely explained by working duration not differential pay.
And I've personally known no mothers who think the population of women is better served by reducing their part-time work, and having them work more.
> women on average in the UK have 2 children, and take four years out of work to have them, and when in work, work for 9 years part-time. That creates a theoretical paygap of 20% on a 40 year career.
And people wonder why professional women don't want to have children any more.
The lifetime pay for a median UK worker @40yr @35k/yr ~= 1.4mil
The "cost" of two children, with above numbers, for "mean woman" is 20% of pay -- so she earns ~1.1m
Presented on a deathbed: would you have preferred to earn 1.4mil over your working life and have neither of your two children, or 1.1m and have both?
The question would seem an absurdity. Bearing in mind that 300k comes with a lifetime of zoom calls and emails, and not much else.
Now if you want to pay women to have children, that's a proposal I'd be open to -- it would reduce the pay gap by significant tax rises, and so on. Nevertheless, I've not met any mothers who wanted to work more nor would take the trade for 1.4 over 1.1 (this, of course, doesnt control for tax credits or welfare -- which both perform this redistribution anyway).
The paygap is just a measure of the number of women having children. What percentage should have children? If you want a zero mean paygap, the answer has to be zero.
A woman who has two children, at minimum, works two years less. In a (25 - 65) yr career that's a 10% pay gap she'll experience wrt a male who works the same period.
The paygap is just a dial which controls the rate of motherhood.
There is no "per job" paygap. Nor could there plausibly be. For if any group could be paid less to do the same work, someone en mass would be, thus lowering the pay for that work. (Its unclear how such a rich source of free output from 50% of the population could go untapped, systematically).
Though even if that logic isnt persuasive, there is no measured per-job pay difference at an individual level. The "pay gap" describes a mean difference in pay at population level -- when you control for total hours worked, it disappears.
That wouldnt "solve" the paygap, women still need to be out of the workforce for O(1yr) per child. That would be an "individual" pay gap of around 10% for a women who has two children.
Why is noramlizing a population statistic, like average pay, more important to you than motherhood?
I've never met a mother who wanted to be in work full time. What exactly do zoom meetings, email threads, and spreadsheets get you in life?
I'm not one to say "captialism has gone too far", but perhaps in this case at least, isnt it mad to force average labour hours to be the same across sexes "just because" ?
We don't have any real firm details yet, the pre-legislative consultation only closed last week.
However that consultation said this:
>We propose to introduce this requirement [pay transparency in recruitment] through a delegated power, enabling regulations to specify exact requirements. For example, the size of a salary range.
That’s as ridiculous as some of the job postings here with a range of $100K-300K. Without bounding the range in some way like you say, this does absolutely nothing.
Can we also make it mandatory to reply to a job application, even just an automated "sorry, your application has been rejected", so you know whether to keep considering that job?
People will make out hiding salaries is some grand conspiracy, but if you've ever been on the other side of hiring, people just don't know.
Would you like to have to pin your salary on your CV? Probably you are hopeful you can get as much as possible. And employers look for a deal. It works both ways.
I agree that personally I'd prefer to see the salary on the job advert. But state meddling generally leads to unexpected outcomes.
>but if you've ever been on the other side of hiring, people just don't know.
I've spent my entire career on the other side of hiring and I've yet to encounter a single valid excuse for not knowing, and subsequently not advertising, a salary range. Before you hire, you need to know if you can afford to hire. If you know you can afford to hire, you know what you can afford to pay. It really is that simple.
Affordability is different to declaring your position at the outset.
For example, when I buy a used car or a house, I know what my budget is. But I'm not telling the seller that upfront. Because my budget does not mean I want to pay the top end of the budget. I'd rather pay below my budget if I can.
The only excuse for forcing employers to do declare is that you want to hold them to a higher ethical standard. Not because there's no reason to do otherwise strategically.
Such laws do not really help in practice. Does a 60-90k range in EU, commonly given to engineering roles, offer any real guidance? A better system would be publishing the average salary for a similar role, but that would be a privacy problem for a low headcount team, or if the role doesn't exist yet... This is a really hard problem.
It's actually not hard at all, it's only a problem for companies if they fail to keep it secret. Norway has had their tax records public for ages https://www.weforum.org/stories/economic-growth/norway-can-s... and their society and economy seems fine, except they it's extremely easy for new grade to know what they can ask for.
The "complications" are basically employer and manager propaganda because the information asymmetry suits them better than people realising they are undervalued and leaving
Salaries being a public record does come with some downsides for employees.
For the low-paid, it can make it even harder to get credit, or a place to rent, and it can be used for other kinds of discrimination. For the highly-paid, service providers and sales people can use the information to increase the prices you pay and make negotiation harder.
More transparency in a society is for the better. This shouldn't stop at salaries. Why aren't service providers required to disclose what they charge others? Why aren't dentists, lawyers, surgeons etc... required to report their stats? All of those would break information asymmetry and make for better decisions all around and less scams.
your bank already knows your salary, and if they don't they are going to ask for it as a condition to give you credit. in some countries landlords ask for proof of income too. the less regulated these areas, the more likely that is going to happen.
Even better, grocery stores might make various discounts and promotions eligible based on whether you belong to a certain bottom percentile of income. That’s the holy grail of price discrimination („milk them for all they have”), which is now attempted to achieve only through imperfect means such as premium brands, up-sells etc.
Ranges are still somewhat useful. If they low-ball the upper bound, anyone expecting close or above the upper bound is unlikely to apply. So there is incentive to be honest about that end at least. But as an applicant (or current employee), knowing the upper bound the company is willing to pay for this position is useful information for salary negotiations (and to enable you to spend your limited time and resources in applying to well-paid jobs)
Obviously it's not perfect. But as you say, it's a difficult problem. And salary ranges are at least something
In my experience, they will offer a bit above the advertised minimum of the range. So if I wasn't happy with £60,000, I wouldn't consider that job, and I definitely wouldn't apply on the basis that maybe they'll offer £90,000.
That's fine though - As long as they're publishing the actual range that they like realistically pay someone, there's literally nothing wrong with that.
Not the reality in sectors that already do this, like the civil service, but it will cap the upper limit that people can negotiate to.
Even if the minimum does apply everywhere, it fixes the inequalities gap that is causing so much economic drag in the UK: white men earn significantly more than any other demographic today for the exact same roles at the exact same companies. If everyone gets the bottom of the band, at least everyone gets the same, and that’s been an important goal for multiple UK governments of different political stripes over many decades for reasons to complex to go into here (and no, it’s not “political correctness”, it’s far more complex than that).
I also don’t think it likely means average salaries come down, I just think it means the distributions narrow.
> white men earn significantly more than any other demographic today for the exact same roles at the exact same companies
I think this would be illegal under the Equality Act (which does not of course mean it doesn't happen), can you offer some examples or further reading?
I assume one day the racism and sexism in the commenter you're replying to will be addressed.
Until then, you are quite correct. The pay gap is not a feature of individual jobs, but a population effect due to women in their 40s+ not being in the labour force.
It is illegal in the UK to pay differently, and there are many high profile cases of this being enforced even to the point of absurdity (such as forcing councils to pay bin-men/trash-collectors the same as female office admin workers).
Likewise as the mean pay for women is ~1month/yr lower, the mean hours men work, as a population is ~1month/yr longer. Thus there is no pay gap once you control for hours worked.
Incidentally, the only way there could be no mean pay gap across both populations would be if no women had children. So a non-trivial paygap merely an indirect measure of the birth rate.
There are two elements to women being paid less. Both exist, but they are deliberately conflated for reasons.
One is that women do get paid less for the same job on average.
The second is that jobs which women tend to do get paid less than jobs which men tend to do, either through different industries or through different opportunities.
It’s not as clear as “yes” though, and there is little evidence boiling down to the “same job” disparity.
No. This claim relies on deceptive definitions of "exact same role".
Employment tribunals in the UK now regularly conclude that jobs which are clearly different are actually the same, essentially as a bung to women. For example, stating that working in a warehouse lifting boxes all day is the same job as working on a checkout till sitting on a seat, or that being a librarian has the same value as a guy collecting garbage. Being a bin man is much higher paid because it's a dangerous, dirty and low status job that people don't want to do, so the incentives have to be correspondingly higher to attract workers, but delusional left wing tribunals declare by fiat that they're the same as highly feminized jobs that are clean and safe.
This now regularly causes chaos in Britain, for example in Birmingham where trash just doesn't get collected because the bin men went on strike:
> The council also says that the Waste Recycling and Collection Officer role does not exist at other councils, and that retaining the role opens it up to equal pay claims, since it is performed mainly by men.[2] In March 2025, the council declared a major incident after 17,000 tonnes of rubbish were left uncollected on the streets.
Look at the wider picture of unfair pay employment tribunals that are driving HMG to introduce this legislation and you’ll see the problem is real, systemic and decades old.
I have personally had to advise boards that their discussion of compensation adjustments to women of child bearing age are illegal, it is a rife and widespread practice and absurd.
Given the government is introducing the legislation to stop the cycle of unfair pay employment tribunals (that are often successful), I think you’re not looking at the same data set they are.
Would that actually be a good thing? When a company publishes the salary range, that means the job seeker agrees to that range, including maybe getting the lower part of the range. Companies know that, and now they have the advantage to put lower ranges.
if i don't agree to the range then i don't need to bother applying. saves me lot's of time.
if i apply despite not liking the range i can still say no and ask for more, but not knowing the range in advance is unlikely to raise the chance of that happening.
How is that going to work if you interview Bob for X task at Y pay, but discover Bob would be much better suited for A task that is worth more salary? What if Bob didn't meet the requirements for X, but would be a perfect fit for B task that is not worth as much salary?
The requirement is to publish either minimal salary or salary range for the position from the advertisement. If company has several positions available then specific minimal salaries should be given for each.
Sometimes companies create a specific position for an interviewee after getting to know the candidate. For example, a candidate might have an unexpected unusual skill.
What does that have to do with providing a salary range for a particular job posting? That specific position created should also have a range - publish that. Normally you have to interview other candidates for this position too.
Unless you’re some VP/Director/Distinguished Eng/C-level etc, this doesn’t happen in practice. Those jobs don’t follow normal job posting rules anyway, they’re usually sought out.
99.99% of the time, I doubt the job is ever adapted for the person. They come in with that skillset and are usually expected to grow and meet the needs of the other job areas.
And in any normal court they will lose since its a different position and they agreed (paper trail) for that switch. Or they could be just let go if company is too careful. Not that such situation happens often in real world, I never even heard about even one.
If they would sue it would also burn their professional creds permanently, nobody sane would ever want to hire such a problematic person.
Then you tell Bob about how he would be much better suited for job A or B, explain how the pay is less, and if he's cool with it, directly put his CV into the pile for that job. If he's not cool with it, shake his hand and wish him a good day
Presumably the law will be written to account for advertised role != assigned role, but it can't account for gaming the system by never hiring exactly the advertised position.
Labour's approach to problems is to tax employers into oblivion and then say "the reason salaries are so low is because we didn't ban them from posting adverts without salary disclosure".
To be clear, I mean employment is already taxed extremely highly.
Burnham put cost of living as his highest priority, then this is the kind of measures he comes out with. If you think more red tape and bureaucracy is going to help then I've got nothing.
This isn’t red tape or bureaucracy though. Many things are, but not this. Infact it actually reduces waste for both comapnies and citizens because they won’t have people applying who will turn down due to the salary.
A second reason is to avoid discrimination. Applicants that feel disadvantaged, even if they are actually qualified, may hesitate to negotiate for a higher salary in the same way that a other applicants would. The consequence is that they start with a lower salary. This applies specially to women. Plenty of research shows that they are less likely to negotiate their salary.
Research[1] suggests that pay transparency leads to lower average salaries because employers avoid paying higher wages to any one employee to avoid costly negotiations with others. The effect is small, around 2%, and it disappears with increasing degree of unionization. In my opinion this is an acceptable price to pay to reduce pay inequality, which often is much more than 2%. It is also a good argument for joining a union.
[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w28903
It's very hard for people to accept that this might even be the case, many people just assume that transparency is better for workers.
That said I think Jury is still out on pay transparency mostly because there isn't that much practical data. The EU has been navigating it for a few years but research is still ongoing.
One paper (which is more focused on pay gap reporting, which is longer implemented and seems to have limited impact) suggests salary disclosure in job ads actually increases wages.
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pay-transparency-in-pro...
It's definitely obvious that internal salary transparency will a) act to normalise salaries over the long term and b) generally depress salaries. But disclosure at the job as stage is less clear.
See also: hiking the minimum wage (possibly the most obvious example of academic corruption), rent controls, taxing the rich, etc.
There are a number of reasons for this, but the primary ones are 1) economists also respond to incentives and those think tank jobs pay really well and 2) prestige in the industry is also a commodity - a commodity which can be bought and sold. The level to which money talks in this industry is reflected by the wages - always higher than all other humanities.
As an example the freakonomics guys popularity are to popular economics what k pop is to music: a slick, highly refined, marketed product from a superbly well oiled marketing machine.
My first question to any recruiter is now always "what's the salary range for this role?" precisely because I've run into your first point earlier in my career. I'm not even particularly salary-driven (doing interesting, valuable work is far more important!) but it's the best indicator that the role is pitched at the right level for me.
From an employer's point of view, there's also the avoidance of future unpleasantness if (or, rather, when) it comes to light that some staff are paid significantly less than their peers.
Responsible employers don't need mandatory salary disclosures to do the right thing here but, sadly, not all employers are responsible so this sets a common baseline and ensures everyone plays by the same rules.
At least the young women in UK are outearning (and outeducating) young men.
More critically; historical data shows pay gap for women increases through their 20s and jumps significantly in their 30s
A company has a fixed amount of money it can spend on wages. Reducing wage inequality means paying less to the best employees and more to the others, which is great if you just want to slack off but terrible if you're already one of the highest paid employees.
I'll argue that money goes to those who are best at internal politics, with perhaps a moderate correlation with work performance.
The only time I have seen a correlation greater than 0 is where bonuses where directly linked to earnings or sales ... even then the correlation was not 1
- Some employee salary discrepancies are inefficiencies due to humans sucking at rationally evaluating other people
- Some employee salary discrepancies are legitimate outcomes of value produced relative to other employees
The problem is the more we create policy assuming the first one is true, we eliminate everyone in the second category (however small or large that category), making the economy less efficient. I would argue pay transparency isn't one of those policies however, and in fact would lead to more efficiencies.
That said, all interventions have consequences, and less growth and higher inefficiency from cutting tall poppies is indeed a risk. As someone in Europe, our total lack of productivity growth is leading to collapsing governments and underwater social entitlement systems. These are serious issues that should be discussed and not dismissed outright with downvotes.
What can happen, which is why you may have seen budget constraints prevent profit-maximising hiring, is that the finance dept is operating off older information than the managers in business units (or just is crosswise with them for any reason at all). You can definitely get a situation in which managers can't get approval to do profit maximising hires, but this isn't inevitable.
When they hire and amazing 100x employee they have higher sales, revenues and profits with which to pay employees.
Absolutely not. It has a maximum, sure, and a minimum it can get away with, but there's always a range in between them.
> Reducing wage inequality means paying less to the best employees
Bold assumption that the best are paid the most.
The thing is, if you're rewarding performance through _process_ it ends up being more public and you have to have a written justification for it. Not just favouritism.
Indeed the only reason I could do this was because the new salary ranges were shown thanks to pay transparency.
It is your fault if you allow the recruiting process to get to the third interview without at least knowing if the salary range is acceptable.
If you lack confidence in talking money, here is what you say:
"I'm looking for $120K to $130K. Before we get further into the process I want to confirm that this salary range is what would be discussed if we get to an offer."
You might add:
"$120K is my minimum but I am really hoping to find a role at the higher end - $130K is what I'm aiming for, depending on the job."
If, after saying all this, you get lowballed, then you have good reason to be very annoyed, and express calmly but clearly that you have had your minimum salary on the table since the first phone call." At that point you withdraw from the process and go look for a job with a professional company.
This law will force them to actaully stick to a number.
Also, large parts of the UK culturally have difficulty talking about money. (Exceptions are Yorkshire, which is proud of it's difference here, and (parts of?) Scotland). That's not going to change overnight, so making disclosure a legal requirement is a fair solution.
It isn't uncommon to be given an acceptable figure, go through several rounds of interviews and end up with job offer but with a lower salary than initially agreed because the recruiter padded the numbers.
No, it doesn't lose the negotiation. What makes you think so? Setting anchors and controlling the document is very powerful.
But yes, you need to know what you can get, and you need to be able and willing to walk away.
> I'm looking for $120K to $130K. Before we get further into the process I want to confirm that this salary range is what would be discussed if we get to an offer.
For me, being fresh out of university, I didn't really think to press on salary too much and was just happy to land a job. In my first job, I recall not knowing the salary until I got the contract and offer (luckily, it was surprisingly above average pay).
When I moved into the software industry, I started to realise my worth a bit more and job-hopped for 10-50% pay bumps on an annual basis for the first few years and just started chasing higher salaries and turning down interviews unless they were in my desired range.
I know many other engineers who never changed this behaviour (or were never taught to be more ruthless and know their worth) and were just happy to receive any increase in salary - and as a result had 10+ years in the industry and had utterly pitiful salaries due to their employer simply taking advantage - you'll never receive the same increase in pay by remaining loyal to a company versus job hopping. I'm not sure if it's a cultural thing in the UK or what but this is the type of advice that should be given in schools more IMO.
Let's say you could command 100k/year but your first job is 30k/year and stay there for several years because you like the work environment. Then you'd go to the next company and ask for, I dunno, maybe 50k/year and think that's a huge bump. If you saw salary ranges for similar positions elsewhere you'd be more inclined to start looking around even if you were happy at your current employer.
Nowadays things are a bit more transparent in the tech world with stuff like levels.fyi (but you have to know about those), but I'm thinking it would benefit people in all fields.
Sure, but the first phone call happens after you have already spent potentially hours putting together a tailored resume, cover letter, and 3 creative writing prompts about how you resolved a conflict with a coworker.
Would you agree to buy a house before you knew what it costs?
Literally insane behaviour
Depending on your circumstances, that might be reasonable. If most people aren't quoting pay ranges and you need a job, not applying because of that isn't very smart.
I would make sure I knew the pay range before going through all the interview rounds, but not sending your CV in sounds too limiting to me.
That's the first I've heard of it, and I've seen plenty of job postings the past year for European companies where there was no salary indication. See for example the recent HN Who's Hiring? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50338728
Again, member states miss European deadlines, but since it has no practical consequences, I don't see a why they would do it differently.
So companies are not even breaking the law, just delaying the process...
I was like, okay, fair enough.
I played it completely wrong though. I should have just reframed it and said, well, I paid this, but you're not competing against my current employer, you're competing against Meta, who I'm also interviewing with this week.
In small companies this does mean people have to operate with internal Chinese walls in their heads.
"My current salary is xyz, but I'm currently interviewing with several companies, so my salary expectations are tied to what I'm worth in the market, not my current pay. My specific ask will change as interviews progress"
As an employer that ruins one of the classic ruses that has been going on for a while: take someone through multiple interviews and then lowball the candidate who seems the most desperate.
If you believe in free market economics I think we can expect this to be a mess for a little while and then within a year or two it gets relatively efficient at dealing with the inefficiencies it’s targeting: younger people just not wanting to play the bullshit game where employers dangle generous starting offers, and then rug pull them to 2/3rds of that number; and to fix the gender pay gap (and the smaller reaching ethnicity pay gap).
There is no gender pay gap in 20s, 30s with several areas now favouring women. The mean pay gap is entirely due to the percentage of women in their 40s+ taking time off work for motherhood.
We can also do the simulation trivially using empirical data, women on average in the UK have 2 children, and take four years out of work to have them, and when in work, work for 9 years part-time. That creates a theoretical paygap of 20% on a 40 year career across male/female populations
The claim that the economy sustains a free markdown on 50% of the population's labour is mad. What force of nature is keeping a mass of businesses forming just hiring this cheap labour? Why arent there businesses booming hiring, en mass, women?
Either way, aside from that madness. The effect is, to a significant figure, entirely explained by working duration not differential pay.
And I've personally known no mothers who think the population of women is better served by reducing their part-time work, and having them work more.
And people wonder why professional women don't want to have children any more.
The "cost" of two children, with above numbers, for "mean woman" is 20% of pay -- so she earns ~1.1m
Presented on a deathbed: would you have preferred to earn 1.4mil over your working life and have neither of your two children, or 1.1m and have both?
The question would seem an absurdity. Bearing in mind that 300k comes with a lifetime of zoom calls and emails, and not much else.
Now if you want to pay women to have children, that's a proposal I'd be open to -- it would reduce the pay gap by significant tax rises, and so on. Nevertheless, I've not met any mothers who wanted to work more nor would take the trade for 1.4 over 1.1 (this, of course, doesnt control for tax credits or welfare -- which both perform this redistribution anyway).
A woman who has two children, at minimum, works two years less. In a (25 - 65) yr career that's a 10% pay gap she'll experience wrt a male who works the same period.
The paygap is just a dial which controls the rate of motherhood.
There is no "per job" paygap. Nor could there plausibly be. For if any group could be paid less to do the same work, someone en mass would be, thus lowering the pay for that work. (Its unclear how such a rich source of free output from 50% of the population could go untapped, systematically).
Though even if that logic isnt persuasive, there is no measured per-job pay difference at an individual level. The "pay gap" describes a mean difference in pay at population level -- when you control for total hours worked, it disappears.
I've never met a mother who wanted to be in work full time. What exactly do zoom meetings, email threads, and spreadsheets get you in life?
I'm not one to say "captialism has gone too far", but perhaps in this case at least, isnt it mad to force average labour hours to be the same across sexes "just because" ?
However that consultation said this:
>We propose to introduce this requirement [pay transparency in recruitment] through a delegated power, enabling regulations to specify exact requirements. For example, the size of a salary range.
Example: https://www.enduranceenergy.com/careers/2af3b48c-4e20-420a-b...
https://westkite.com/careers-software-engineer
Would you like to have to pin your salary on your CV? Probably you are hopeful you can get as much as possible. And employers look for a deal. It works both ways.
I agree that personally I'd prefer to see the salary on the job advert. But state meddling generally leads to unexpected outcomes.
I've spent my entire career on the other side of hiring and I've yet to encounter a single valid excuse for not knowing, and subsequently not advertising, a salary range. Before you hire, you need to know if you can afford to hire. If you know you can afford to hire, you know what you can afford to pay. It really is that simple.
For example, when I buy a used car or a house, I know what my budget is. But I'm not telling the seller that upfront. Because my budget does not mean I want to pay the top end of the budget. I'd rather pay below my budget if I can.
The only excuse for forcing employers to do declare is that you want to hold them to a higher ethical standard. Not because there's no reason to do otherwise strategically.
The "complications" are basically employer and manager propaganda because the information asymmetry suits them better than people realising they are undervalued and leaving
For the low-paid, it can make it even harder to get credit, or a place to rent, and it can be used for other kinds of discrimination. For the highly-paid, service providers and sales people can use the information to increase the prices you pay and make negotiation harder.
Parasitical private equity firms maximising their prices is a reasonable worry.
Obviously it's not perfect. But as you say, it's a difficult problem. And salary ranges are at least something
Even if the minimum does apply everywhere, it fixes the inequalities gap that is causing so much economic drag in the UK: white men earn significantly more than any other demographic today for the exact same roles at the exact same companies. If everyone gets the bottom of the band, at least everyone gets the same, and that’s been an important goal for multiple UK governments of different political stripes over many decades for reasons to complex to go into here (and no, it’s not “political correctness”, it’s far more complex than that).
I also don’t think it likely means average salaries come down, I just think it means the distributions narrow.
I think this would be illegal under the Equality Act (which does not of course mean it doesn't happen), can you offer some examples or further reading?
Until then, you are quite correct. The pay gap is not a feature of individual jobs, but a population effect due to women in their 40s+ not being in the labour force.
It is illegal in the UK to pay differently, and there are many high profile cases of this being enforced even to the point of absurdity (such as forcing councils to pay bin-men/trash-collectors the same as female office admin workers).
Likewise as the mean pay for women is ~1month/yr lower, the mean hours men work, as a population is ~1month/yr longer. Thus there is no pay gap once you control for hours worked.
Incidentally, the only way there could be no mean pay gap across both populations would be if no women had children. So a non-trivial paygap merely an indirect measure of the birth rate.
Is there any evidence that’s the case?
One is that women do get paid less for the same job on average.
The second is that jobs which women tend to do get paid less than jobs which men tend to do, either through different industries or through different opportunities.
It’s not as clear as “yes” though, and there is little evidence boiling down to the “same job” disparity.
Employment tribunals in the UK now regularly conclude that jobs which are clearly different are actually the same, essentially as a bung to women. For example, stating that working in a warehouse lifting boxes all day is the same job as working on a checkout till sitting on a seat, or that being a librarian has the same value as a guy collecting garbage. Being a bin man is much higher paid because it's a dangerous, dirty and low status job that people don't want to do, so the incentives have to be correspondingly higher to attract workers, but delusional left wing tribunals declare by fiat that they're the same as highly feminized jobs that are clean and safe.
This now regularly causes chaos in Britain, for example in Birmingham where trash just doesn't get collected because the bin men went on strike:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025%E2%80%932026_Birmingham_b...
> The council also says that the Waste Recycling and Collection Officer role does not exist at other councils, and that retaining the role opens it up to equal pay claims, since it is performed mainly by men.[2] In March 2025, the council declared a major incident after 17,000 tonnes of rubbish were left uncollected on the streets.
Look at the wider picture of unfair pay employment tribunals that are driving HMG to introduce this legislation and you’ll see the problem is real, systemic and decades old.
I have personally had to advise boards that their discussion of compensation adjustments to women of child bearing age are illegal, it is a rife and widespread practice and absurd.
Quick reminder of the classic takedown of that misleading nonsense:
Cathy Newman interviewing Jordan Peterson on the gender pay gap etc
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Xg2psply4no
Original:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=aMcjxSThD54
You didn't need to bring colour and gender into it.
if i apply despite not liking the range i can still say no and ask for more, but not knowing the range in advance is unlikely to raise the chance of that happening.
99.99% of the time, I doubt the job is ever adapted for the person. They come in with that skillset and are usually expected to grow and meet the needs of the other job areas.
If they would sue it would also burn their professional creds permanently, nobody sane would ever want to hire such a problematic person.
Sounds like lose-lose.
So what is the point of the law, if there are all these workarounds?
Burnham put cost of living as his highest priority, then this is the kind of measures he comes out with. If you think more red tape and bureaucracy is going to help then I've got nothing.
The opposite to bureaucracy is allowing them to approach hiring however they see fit.