Only 2% of European Job Ads Disclose Salary - One Month After the EU Pay Transparency Deadline

If you are job hunting in Europe, you already know the ritual: read the listing, scan for the salary, find nothing, apply anyway, and hope the number at the end of four interview rounds does not waste everyone’s time. Our data shows exactly how bad it is - and how different it could be.

We analyzed 2,728,585 job listings posted between April 1 and June 30, 2026 by 215,101 employers - collected directly from company career sites running 46+ applicant tracking systems (Workday, Greenhouse, SmartRecruiters and others), plus the EU’s EURES network. This is first-party data straight from the source: what employers themselves publish, not scraped job boards. The headline: only 1.8% of job listings in the EU disclose a salary. In the United States, it is 37.4% - American job ads are more than 20 times more transparent than European ones.

And here is the uncomfortable timing: the EU Pay Transparency Directive - the law that, among other things, gives applicants the right to salary information before the interview - had its implementation deadline on June 7, 2026. One month later, European job ads are still almost universally silent.

The numbers: Europe stays silent

North America sets the pace: Canada (39.4%) and the United States (37.4%) disclose salaries in more than a third of listings, driven largely by state and provincial pay transparency laws. The United Kingdom (21.5%) and Ireland (17.7%) follow. Then the cliff: no other EU country reaches 5%.

Some numbers deserve a second look. Germany, Europe’s largest economy: 0.7%. Sweden - the country that has paused implementation of the directive entirely and wants it renegotiated: 0.0%, fewer than 1 in 2,000 listings. Switzerland, outside the EU and untouched by the directive, sits at 0.1%.

The law is here - the salaries are not

The EU Pay Transparency Directive (2023/970) requires employers to tell applicants the initial salary or salary range for a position before the interview - in the vacancy notice or ahead of the interview - and bans asking candidates about their pay history. Member states had until June 7, 2026 to write it into national law.

That deadline was not postponed. The European Commission confirmed in December 2025 that it would stand - no pause, no extension. What happened instead is that most member states simply missed it. Italy, Slovakia, Lithuania and Malta transposed on time. The Netherlands, Denmark and Czechia have pushed implementation to January 2027. Sweden paused entirely.

Does transposing the law actually help? Early signs: a little. In the four countries that implemented on time, 2.9% of Q2 listings disclosed salary - nearly double the 1.6% in the delay group. Italy (4.6%) and Lithuania (4.3%) are the EU’s (very modest) front-runners. But even the compliant countries are nowhere near the directive’s spirit: pay transparency in Europe is still the exception, not the rule.

After the deadline: nothing changed

The sharpest test is to look only at listings posted after June 7, 2026 - the ones published when the directive’s deadline had already passed. Of the 792,072 EU job listings posted after the deadline, just 1.3% disclose a salary. For comparison, US listings posted in the same weeks: 37.0%. If European employers changed anything on the day the law kicked in, it does not show in their job ads.

To be fair to the directive: it is early days. Four weeks is not enough time to rewrite hiring workflows, and in most member states the national law that actually binds employers is not yet in force - the bulk of implementations will land between now and January 2027, with enforcement and sanctions following later. The honest conclusion from this data is not that the directive has failed; it is that, one month in, employer behavior has not yet started to move.

We will keep tracking this. Mokaru monitors millions of live job listings every day, so we can measure the directive's real-world effect as national laws come into force. We will re-run this analysis quarterly and publish the trend - if European job ads start disclosing salaries, this is where you will see it first.

The remote exception

The most striking pattern in the data: remote job listings in the EU are 7 times more likely to disclose salary than on-site listings (11.5% vs. 1.6%). Employers hiring remotely compete in an international talent pool - one where US-style transparency is increasingly the norm. Competition, not regulation, is currently doing more for European pay transparency than the directive.

In the US, the remote/on-site gap barely exists (39.6% vs. 37.3%) - transparency laws there apply regardless of where the work happens.

Who benefits from the silence?

In the US, entry-level listings are the most transparent of all seniority levels (41.8%). In the EU, disclosure is low across the board but bottoms out for mid-level roles (1.1%). Whichever way you cut it, the burden of the European information gap falls on the people with the least negotiating leverage: candidates who cannot afford to walk away from four rounds of interviews when the offer finally lands below their floor.

What this means for job seekers

Until the directive has teeth, European candidates are still negotiating in the dark. Three practical takeaways from the data:

1. Remote-friendly listings are your best source of salary information in Europe. If pay clarity matters to you, the 11.5% disclosure rate in remote listings beats anything national job markets currently offer.

2. Know your rights - they may be newer than you think. If you are interviewing in Italy, Slovakia, Lithuania or Malta, the directive’s rules are already national law: you are entitled to salary information before the interview, and employers may not ask what you currently earn.

3. The information asymmetry is the employer’s advantage - close it before you negotiate. Research market rates for your role before the first call, because the listing will not tell you.

Methodology

This analysis covers all 2,728,585 job listings posted between April 1 and June 30, 2026 that were live in Mokaru’s job index in early July 2026. The listings come from 215,101 distinct employers and were collected directly from company career sites - Mokaru continuously monitors the hiring pages of over 260,000 companies across 46+ applicant tracking systems (Workday, SmartRecruiters, Greenhouse, iCIMS, SuccessFactors and others) - supplemented by the EU’s EURES job mobility network. Listings are read from the employer’s own published data, not aggregated from third-party job boards. “Salary disclosure” means the listing contains structured, machine-readable salary data (a minimum salary or salary range). Salaries mentioned only in free-text descriptions are not counted, so true disclosure rates may be somewhat higher across all countries; this affects every country equally and does not change the relative picture. Country assignment is based on the job’s posted location. Country values were normalized (ISO codes and local spellings map to one country); listings whose country field held an ambiguous or non-country value - for example a bare US state code - were excluded from country-level figures (about 8% of the dataset, most of it from countries not reported here). Listings labeled “CA” were counted as Canada only when a Canadian province was present. Country-level percentages are exact counts, not estimates; only countries with at least 2,500 listings are reported.

This data is free to use with attribution. For questions about the dataset, country-level breakdowns we did not publish, or media inquiries, contact us at hello@mokaru.ai.