'A sour impression' | Why is the UK shying away from pay transparency on job ads?

At a time when employers are supposed to be boosting levels of transparency, an uncomfortable truth is that when it comes to one key piece of employer-to-employee information – pay – most organisations are guilty of being the very opposite.

Last June, Adzuna starkly revealed what has long been a source of ire amongst jobseekers – that salary information on job ads is now vey much the exception than the rule. Not only did it find less than half (47%) of job adverts contained salary information, but this level is now the lowest it’s been since 2016 – when it first started measuring this. It was in 2023 that the proportion of job postings with salaries on them fell below 50% for the first time, and the trend has been downward ever since.