Data
Do employers show pay in EU job ads? Same firms, US vs EU
Employers that hire in both the US and the EU state pay in 68.8% of their US job adverts and 19.2% of their EU adverts. RoleFinder counted 55,236 open roles that 1,071 employers posted on their own career sites between 23 October and 6 November 2026, about five months after the EU's pay transparency deadline.
The same job, two answers
A US software company advertises an Enterprise Account Executive in Chicago with a pay range of about $240,000 to $300,000. Its advert for the same title in Germany, published the same week, gives no figure. That is the pattern, not one firm's habit: of 120 job titles an employer advertised in both regions with a US pay figure, 77 of the EU versions gave none. Among employers with at least five open roles on each side, 286 state pay on at least half of their US adverts, and 117 of those state it on none of their EU adverts.
The ranges exist; they stop at the Atlantic
Most of these employers already set pay ranges and publish them for their US roles. In the EU, Directive (EU) 2023/970 gives applicants a right to the initial pay or its range, given "such as in a published job vacancy notice, prior to the job interview or otherwise" (Article 5(1)). Member states had to make it law by 7 June 2026. Where a country only copies that wording, an advert without pay is not a breach. Of the countries we checked, three go further and require the figure in the advert itself: Austria since 2011, Slovakia since 2018 and Italy since 7 June 2026. There, the same employers state pay in 52.6% of adverts (640 of 1,216); in the rest of the EU, 16.1%. Latvia's Labour Law (section 32(3)) also asks for a pay range in adverts; we have not added Latvia to that group, so its roles count with the rest of the EU unless they also list Austria, Italy or Slovakia.
Where the role is
| Where the role is | Open roles | State pay | Share (95% interval) | Law requires pay in the advert |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States (same employers) | 41,247 | 28,386 | 68.8% (68.4 to 69.3) | in some states |
| European Union, all | 13,989 | 2,691 | 19.2% (18.6 to 19.9) | see rows |
| Slovakia | 114 | 76 | 66.7% (57.6 to 74.7) | yes, since 2018 |
| Austria | 238 | 137 | 57.6% (51.2 to 63.7) | yes, since 2011 |
| Italy | 869 | 429 | 49.4% (46.1 to 52.7) | yes, since June 2026 |
| Poland | 1,449 | 427 | 29.5% (27.2 to 31.9) | no (advert or before interview) |
| Ireland | 997 | 256 | 25.7% (23.1 to 28.5) | not reviewed |
| Netherlands | 1,144 | 243 | 21.2% (19.0 to 23.7) | no (bill pending) |
| Belgium | 354 | 75 | 21.2% (17.3 to 25.7) | not reviewed |
| Romania | 337 | 44 | 13.1% (9.9 to 17.1) | not reviewed |
| Germany | 2,909 | 368 | 12.7% (11.5 to 13.9) | no |
| Spain | 1,648 | 198 | 12.0% (10.5 to 13.7) | no |
| France | 2,340 | 267 | 11.4% (10.2 to 12.8) | no (bill pending) |
| Portugal | 371 | 40 | 10.8% (8.0 to 14.3) | not reviewed |
| Czechia | 386 | 41 | 10.6% (7.9 to 14.1) | not reviewed |
| Sweden | 386 | 37 | 9.6% (7.0 to 12.9) | not reviewed |
| Bulgaria | 221 | 19 | 8.6% (5.6 to 13.0) | not reviewed |
| Denmark | 355 | 22 | 6.2% (4.1 to 9.2) | not reviewed |
| Hungary | 376 | 20 | 5.3% (3.5 to 8.1) | not reviewed |
| 10 other EU countries | 620 | 215 | 34.7% (31.0 to 38.5) | not reviewed |
Roles at the 1,071 employers that had open roles in both regions. A role listing two EU countries counts in each (498 roles), so country rows add up to more than the EU total. Law column: official texts as of 30 October 2026, re-read on 6 November 2026; "not reviewed" means we did not check that country.
How we counted
- Source. RoleFinder reads employers' own career sites. This count uses the three applicant tracking systems whose adverts we store in full: Workday (687 employers), Greenhouse (301) and Ashby (83). Roles open on 6 November 2026, posted 23 October to 6 November 2026; half of them were posted on or after 2 November 2026.
- Same employers. We kept employers with at least one open role in the US and one in an EU country: 41,247 US roles and 13,989 EU roles. Roles that list both a US and an EU location (314) are left out.
- Location comes from the advert's own location text.
- "States pay" means the advert gives a figure or a range: in euro or an EU national currency for EU roles, in dollars for US roles. It can sit in the text or in the board's pay field. Bonuses, allowances, vouchers, funding and revenue figures do not count.
- The pay check was built and tested on 185 live adverts in October 2026 and frozen before this count.
- Checked by hand. On 6 November 2026 we drew 20 adverts at random (10 US, 10 EU, one per employer) and read each one on the employer's own site: our count agreed on 18. Both misses were US adverts with a pay range that we counted as no pay (one range sat in the board's separate pay field, one hourly range was labelled annual). One drawn role had closed and was replaced by the next one drawn.
- Recounted. A second full read 9 minutes later gave 68.9% and 19.2%, with the same employers.
- Intervals are 95% Wilson intervals: US 68.4 to 69.3, EU 18.6 to 19.9. They cover sampling noise, not the misses of the pay check.
Limits
- Adverts only. Article 5 lets employers give pay before the interview instead, so a missing figure is not proof that a candidate never learns it.
- The text check misses some pay statements. The misses we found were US ranges, so the real gap is probably a little wider.
- 57 EU adverts state pay only in dollars and count as no pay; counting them gives 19.6%.
- Employers on these three systems lean toward large and tech companies. This is not a sample of every EU employer.
- One employer here is one careers site: a company with two sites counts twice. Greenhouse dates a role by its last update, so some of its roles were first posted before the window.
- One fortnight of postings.
The data
The CSV has one row per employer, with an anonymous employer_id instead of a name:
ats_kind, us_roles, us_with_pay, eu_roles,
eu_with_pay, then <country>_roles and <country>_with_pay for
each EU country by its two-letter ISO code (de_roles, it_with_pay and so on). Summing
the columns gives every count on this page except the same-title pairs, the hand check and the
Austria, Italy and Slovakia group.
Data: RoleFinder (jobs.urbanodx.com), 6 November 2026. Licence CC BY 4.0: please link to this page.