Where the salary is actually stated
Pay appears on a minority of job adverts, and which ones depends far more on the board that carried the advert than on the country the job is in.
Jobzyl3 min read
Figures on this page are current as of
Most job adverts do not tell you what the job pays. That is not a surprise to anyone who has spent an evening applying for things. What is less obvious is how unevenly the silence is distributed, and that the pattern has more to do with plumbing than with employers.
9.7%
of postings state a salary the employer actually quoted
Counted over 1,495,394 distinct postings across eight of the places we search. Duplicates are collapsed first, so this counts jobs and not adverts: one employer running the same role two hundred times counts once.
Data as of
The split is not really about countries
Group the same postings by the location we searched and the number moves a long way.
Show the numbers
| Category | Value |
|---|---|
| United States | 22.6% |
| United Kingdom | 3.8% |
| India | 3.6% |
| Australia | 0.0% |
| Netherlands | 0.0% |
| Germany | 0.0% |
| Canada | 0.0% |
| France | 0.0% |
Data as of
Read that as a fact about the United States and you would conclude American employers are unusually open about pay. Several of them are, and several states now require it. But the five zeros are the interesting part, and they are not a finding about German or French or Canadian employers at all.
They are a fact about which board carried the advert
Almost every stated salary in that chart arrives through a handful of sources. In the United States it is overwhelmingly one large aggregator plus the federal government's own listings. In the United Kingdom, essentially all of it comes from a single job board. In India it is a cluster of domestic boards.
Everywhere else, the sources we reach either do not carry a salary field or do not return one, so the advert arrives with nothing in it. The employer may well have published a figure on their own careers page. We did not receive it.
This is why pay is not a headline field in the product and not a default filter. A pay filter looks like it narrows your results to the well paid ones. Outside a couple of markets it mostly removes everything, and what it is really filtering on is which board indexed the job.
What that means if you are looking for work
Three things follow, and only the first is about us.
- Treat a missing salary as missing information, not as a bad sign. On this evidence it carries almost no signal about the job.
- If you filter on pay, expect to lose most of the list outside the United States, and check what the filter says it is hiding before you trust the remainder.
- The estimate we show when an employer states nothing is our arithmetic over comparable postings, and it is styled differently on purpose. It is not a number anybody offered you.
You can see the effect directly. Compare
software engineer roles in the United States
with
the same search in Germany
and watch what happens to the pay column.
What this does not show
It does not measure how many employers state pay. It measures how often a stated figure survives the trip from an employer's advert, through whichever board carried it, to us. Those are different questions and only the second one is ours to answer.
It also excludes one large source entirely, because its salary data is partly its own model's estimate rather than the employer's figure, and because its terms do not allow us to publish aggregates derived from it. Including it would roughly double the apparent coverage in several countries with numbers no employer ever wrote down.
And the grouping is by the location we searched, not by where the job is. A remote role advertised to the United States sits in that bucket wherever the person ends up working.
Every figure here comes from the jobs Jobzyl has indexed, and carries the date it was pulled. Subscribe by RSS, or run the search yourself.