EU pay transparency: Are job ads finally getting honest about salaries?

Salary Labels on Job Ads: Italy Leads Europe While Most Nations Stall

Poinews.com – For decades, a quiet asymmetry has shaped the European labour market: candidates pour hours into résumés, interviews, and skills assessments, yet walk away from the entire process without knowing what the job actually pays. The European Commission has long argued that this opacity fuels pay discrimination and widens the gender pay gap. In response, Brussels adopted the Pay Transparency Directive, setting a transposition deadline of 7 June 2026. More than a year later, the continent’s response has been uneven at best — and Italy has emerged as the clear outlier, transforming its job-market landscape within months of the rule taking effect.

Italy’s Rapid Shift

Global hiring platform Indeed tracks salary disclosure across millions of listings. Its data shows a dramatic inflection in Italian postings: the share of ads carrying explicit salary information climbed from 26% in July 2025 to 61% by July 2026. That single-year jump places Italy at the top of the five largest European economies for pay transparency in job advertisements — a position it did not hold twelve months earlier.

Pawel Adrjan, director of economic research at Indeed, framed the trajectory clearly:

“Italy is emerging as a frontrunner on pay transparency among large economies in Europe, and the data suggests regulation is making a real difference.”

The acceleration did not begin on the day the law took effect. Adrjan noted that some employers moved ahead of the June deadline, pushing the January-to-July rise from 35% to 61%. Once the statutory obligation kicked in, however, the pace quickened further. Italy also went beyond the minimum requirements of the EU directive: domestic rules now compel employers to embed the pay range directly inside the job advertisement itself, rather than merely disclosing it at some later stage of recruitment. Jobseekers therefore encounter compensation data before deciding whether to apply at all.

A Continent Still in the Dark

Italy’s progress stands in stark contrast to the rest of Europe. A PwC analysis published in early August 2026 identified just five member states that had completed transposition of the Pay Transparency Directive by November: Italy, Slovakia, Malta, Lithuania, and Greece. Spain had made only limited legislative progress. Germany pushed its implementation timeline into early 2027. France’s position remained formally unspecified.

The practical consequences show up in the numbers. In July 2026, Germany sat at just 14% of postings with salary information, and Spain at 18%. France managed 43%. The Netherlands, often cited as a benchmark for open labour markets, registered 49.5% — still below the halfway mark. Only Italy (61%) and the United Kingdom (60%) crossed the 50% threshold among the six largest European economies tracked by Indeed.

The UK, though no longer an EU member, had held the highest salary-disclosure share on Indeed’s dataset since tracking began in early 2020. In January 2020, British postings carried salary information at a 40% rate, while France trailed at 20%. By July 2026, Italy had overtaken the UK for the first time in that comparison — a narrow one-point margin, but symbolically significant given that the UK’s lead persisted for over six years.

Why Transparency Matters: The Gender Pay Gap Context

The Commission’s original rationale for the directive was straightforward. When compensation data is withheld from candidates, employers retain unilateral control over pay-setting. That control, the Commission argued, enables discrimination and sustains structural pay gaps. Eurostat data puts the EU gender pay gap at 11.1% in 2024 — meaning that for every €100 men earn on average, women earn €88.90. Closing that gap requires, among other things, that candidates can compare offers and negotiate from an informed position.

Esther Lynch, general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), reacted sharply to the widespread failure to meet the June deadline:

“Pay secrecy hands all the power to the employer and leaves women and their trade unions without the information needed to challenge unequal pay.”

Lynch characterised the missed deadline as a betrayal of working women across the continent. Her framing underscores that the directive is not merely a paperwork exercise; it is a tool intended to redistribute bargaining information from the employer’s desk to the candidate’s hands.

What Comes Next

Even in Italy, full saturation is not expected. Certain job categories fall outside the directive’s scope, and enforcement mechanics remain under legal debate. Adrjan acknowledged that not every posting yet carries a salary figure, but stressed that employer practices are catching up and the trend is “unmistakably upward.”

For the remaining member states, the question is whether legislatures will eventually transpose the regulation or quietly let it lapse. In several countries, the prevailing expectation among employers is that stating pay ranges in advertisements will ultimately not be mandated. If that expectation hardens into policy, the EU’s transparency ambition will remain largely theoretical outside a handful of jurisdictions.

“The next test will be whether other European countries can deliver the same shift from the principle of transparency into practice,” Adrjan said.

Italy’s experience offers a concrete proof of concept: a single legislative change, enforced within months, can move a national job market by more than 30 percentage points. Whether the rest of Europe follows — or continues to delay, dilute, or ignore the obligation — will determine whether the Pay Transparency Directive becomes a lived reality or another shelf-dusting exercise in Brussels.