Back in 2022, we ran a campaign calling on the UK government to make salary disclosure a legal requirement in job ads. At the time it felt like shouting into a fairly indifferent void. Four years later, the government has opened a consultation proposing exactly that. We’d love to say we saw it coming, but honestly, we just thought it was obviously the right thing to do, and we still do.
Here’s the bit that’s harder to feel good about: while the conversation has finally caught up, the problem itself hasn’t got any better. If anything, it’s proved how stubborn it is.
The numbers, plainly
Just 41.57% of UK job ads disclosed a salary in June this year. April and May were even lower, both sitting at 40.96%. That’s three months in a row at the weakest level we’ve recorded in over a decade of tracking this. Go back to 2016 and the figure was closer to 60%. We’ve spent ten years going in the wrong direction.
Put another way: almost 6 in 10 jobs advertised in the UK right now won’t tell you what they pay. You can spend an evening tailoring a CV, write a covering letter, get invited to interview, and still have no idea whether the role is even in your ballpark.
Why this isn’t just an inconvenience
It’s tempting to file salary transparency under “nice to have” or “would be convenient.” We think that undersells it.
When an employer doesn’t publish what a role pays, they’re the only ones in the conversation who know what it’s actually worth. That imbalance doesn’t sit there neutrally. It creates room for decisions to get made on other grounds entirely – and the government’s own research into this points to exactly what you’d expect: women, people from ethnic minority backgrounds, and disabled candidates are the ones who tend to come off worst when pay gets decided behind closed doors.
There’s also a more mundane cost that gets less airtime. Candidates apply for jobs that were never going to pay what they need. Employers spend time interviewing someone they can’t actually afford to hire. And somewhere in the middle of all this, a genuinely strong candidate looks at a job ad with no number on it, shrugs, and applies somewhere else instead. Nobody chose that outcome. It just happens by default, over and over again.
We didn’t wait for the law either
We’ve never thought this should require legislation to fix, which is why we built a salary estimation tool back in 2013 (if you’ve used Adzuna before, you’ll know our AI powered salary estimates) that gives job seekers a reasonable estimate of what a role probably pays, drawn from years of job posting and salary data, specifically for the roles where the employer hasn’t said. It exists because it’s core to our mission of helping people find better, more fulfilling jobs – but it’s still a workaround, for a problem that employers can solve.
Why employers shouldn’t wait either
Here’s the thing about this consultation: it’s a 15-week process, followed by whatever implementation period comes after that. If you’re an employer, that’s a long time to keep doing the thing the government is actively in the process of telling you not to do.
And unlike a lot of regulatory change, this one doesn’t really require you to wait for clarity on what “compliant” looks like. You already know. Put the salary in the job ad.
The business case for doing it now is not complicated. Job ads with a salary listed get considerably more applications than ones without – our own data has shown this consistently for years. Every candidate who quietly skips your job ad because there’s no number on it is one you never even knew you lost.
Where this leaves things
We’re glad the government has arrived where we already were. It’s a genuinely good development. But four years is a long time to spend proving a point that, frankly, should have been obvious from the start: people deserve to know what a job pays before they spend hours applying for it.
The consultation will run its course. In the meantime, nothing is stopping any employer in the UK from just publishing the number. We’d encourage you to be one of them.