TL;DR: As of 14 August 2026, just 8.3% of European remote job listings state a salary, against 38.9% of American ones, according to RemNavi’s open dataset of around 9,800 live listings. The irony is that the EU has a Pay Transparency Directive (Directive (EU) 2023/970) that requires employers to give applicants a pay range, while the US has no such federal law. But the directive’s transposition deadline of 7 June 2026 passed with most member states, including Spain and Germany, yet to write it into national law – so for now, little compels European employers to name the number. Whether transposition changes that is the figure to watch this autumn.
The EU legislated pay transparency, but remote job listings still hide the salary.
Open twenty remote job listings from European employers and, on the current numbers, fewer than two will tell you what the role pays. Open twenty American ones and you can expect eight to name a figure - so what’s going on here?
If you have spent any time scrolling remote vacancies from this side of the Atlantic – salary field blank, “competitive” where the number should be, “commensurate with experience” – you already suspected as much. Now there is a dataset that measures it, so you’re not imagining it or wondering about intercultural differences. The numbers just aren’t there.
The figures come from RemNavi, an index that pulls remote job listings from sixteen sources and recomputes the numbers nightly. Its founder, Dezso Mezo, got in touch to flag the gap, because it goes straight to a question we keep coming back to at Remote Work Europe: why is it so much harder to compare remote roles in Europe than in the United States? As of 14 August 2026, RemNavi’s live tracker puts salary disclosure at 8.3% of EU-based remote listings (from a sample of 747) against 38.9% of US-based ones (from 4,001). The dataset is open, published under a CC BY 4.0 licence, with the method and a downloadable CSV on the page if you want to check the working yourself.
The EU Pay Transparency Directive, and the deadline most countries missed
The part that should give European policymakers pause is that the region with the pay-transparency law is the one disclosing least!
The EU adopted its Pay Transparency Directive (Directive (EU) 2023/970) in 2023. Among its provisions, Article 5 requires employers to tell job applicants the starting salary, or at least a range, before the interview – the very disclosure these listings are missing. The catch is timing. Member states had until 7 June 2026 to write the directive into national law, and that deadline has now passed, with most of them having missed it. According to the transposition trackers kept by employment-law firms, only a handful of countries had fully transposed it by the deadline; Spain and Germany were among those still without a finished law.
Until a member state’s own legislation is in force, there is little to compel an employer there to put a number on the listing. So clearly many are still defaulting to those woolly fudges about how “competitive” their salaries are…
The United States, by contrast, has no federal pay-transparency law at all. What it has instead is a patchwork of state and city rules – California, Colorado, New York City, Washington and others – that are already in force and already enforced, and that require pay ranges in job postings.
The result is visible in the data: American listings name a salary four to five times more often than European ones. The EU wrote the more ambitious rulebook. The US, for now, is the one practising it.
There is an economic driver beneath the cultural one. US remote salaries tend to run higher, which turns a stated number into a recruiting weapon: if you pay well, saying so pulls better applicants. European employers, often advertising lower figures into a market where no one else shows theirs, have less to gain from disclosure and more cover for staying vague. Transparency is easier when the number flatters you.
In many ways the US has always been more upfront about money and reward and success. Maya wrote about this recently in a piece on freelancing across different markets: the way her American clients would always be the first to name a number and discuss it, in a way her native British self-deprecation sometimes found challenging (but also a bit refreshing!). But it’s a bit rich when the EU has actively legislated to increase transparency and it’s just not happening.
Salary disclosure by country: where Europe stands
RemNavi’s country breakdown (limited to countries with at least 30 listings in the sample, so treat the smaller ones with care) tells a more textured story than a single EU average:
| Country | Listings disclosing pay | Sample size |
|---|---|---|
| Netherlands | 25.0% | 32 |
| Germany | 10.2% | 127 |
| Poland | 8.3% | 48 |
| Ireland | 7.9% | 239 |
| Spain | 7.7% | 52 |
| France | 5.0% | 100 |
| United Kingdom (outside the directive) | 10.9% | 477 |
The Netherlands stands out at a quarter of listings, but on only 32 postings, so it is more a flicker than a finding for now. France sits at the bottom on a healthier sample of 100. Ireland’s rate is low but rests on the largest EU sample here, which makes it more reliable than the headline percentages elsewhere. The UK, which left the EU and is not bound by the directive at all, discloses more often than most member states that are – another sign that the law, on its own, is not yet the thing moving the numbers, perhaps indicative of a business culture somewhat closer to the US than the rest of Europe is.
Has the June 2026 deadline changed anything? Not yet
The obvious follow-up is whether the 7 June deadline nudged employers into disclosing more, even ahead of national laws landing. On RemNavi’s data, the honest answer is no, or at least not yet. Listings posted between January and May disclosed at 7.8%; those posted June to August, at 9.5% – a difference well within the noise at these sample sizes.
Mezo is careful about the caveats, and so are we: the monthly series counts only listings that are still live today, so older months are systematically undercounted, and August is a partial month on a small number of postings. “August shows the first flicker of change, and whether that holds is the number to watch this autumn,” as he puts it. Because the tracker rebuilds every night, that question will answer itself over the coming weeks rather than waiting for anyone’s quarterly report.
His summary of the whole picture is worth quoting in full:
“The EU wrote the rulebook on pay transparency, but US remote listings are the ones practising it. Two months past the June deadline, 7.9% of EU remote listings name a salary against 39.2% in the US. August shows the first flicker of change, and whether that holds is the number to watch this autumn.”
(His figures are from a few days before publication; the tracker updates nightly, which is why the live numbers above differ slightly.)
What low pay transparency means if you’re job-hunting in Europe
For anyone applying to remote roles from Europe, the practical takeaway is unglamorous but useful: you will still have to do the salary homework yourself, because most listings will not do it for you. Ask the range early – the directive’s spirit is on your side even where the letter has not yet arrived, and an employer who genuinely intends to comply should have no trouble answering. And treat an employer who does publish the number as telling you something good about how they operate. The ones disclosing ahead of any legal obligation tend to be the ones who have thought hardest about fair pay, and they attract better applicants for it.
For employers, the same point in reverse: putting the range in the listing is coming to Europe whether or not your member state has finished the paperwork, and the firms that move first look confident rather than compliant. It is a cheap way to stand out in a market where four in five of your competitors still leave the box blank. It also communicates significant things about your business culture. If your mission page talks about transparency, clarity and authenticity, then it’s well worth checking whether your recruitment advertising actually lives up to those values.
We will keep an eye on RemNavi’s autumn numbers to see whether transposition, as it finally lands country by country, moves the dial. If you want to watch it in real time, the tracker is here, rebuilt nightly, with the full method and data open for anyone to check.
Data: RemNavi Pay Transparency Tracker, licensed CC BY 4.0. Directive text: Directive (EU) 2023/970. Related reading: the EU pay transparency directive and remote hiring.
