Remote listings are the blind spot of pay transparency: 5.9% of EU remote jobs state a salary

The EU Pay Transparency Directive asks employers to state a salary range before the first interview. Four months after the June 2026 transposition deadline, the numbers from job ads in general look encouraging: Indeed's economists report that 61% of postings in Italy, about 60% in the UK and about half in the Netherlands now carry salary information. Remote listings tell a different story.

In the seven days to 6 October 2026, RemNavi tracked 1,794 live remote listings that name an EU location. 106 of them, 5.9%, state a salary range. For the UK the figure is 9.4% (79 of 842). For the United States, where state laws have required ranges for several years, it is 37.5% (3,428 of 9,131). Across all 24,931 live listings from the 13 boards and employer career pages RemNavi indexes, 23.9% state a range.

The country cuts inside the EU are thin where the directive is supposed to bite hardest. Germany: 2.6% (10 of 379). Ireland: 3.2% (15 of 473). France: 4.2% (12 of 286). Netherlands: 2.6% (2 of 76). Spain: 3.5% (4 of 115). Poland is the only larger EU market in double figures at 10% (8 of 80). Spain's figure rests on 115 listings; the Netherlands' on 76. Markets with fewer than 50 live remote listings in the window are not reported as rates: Italy had 7 disclosing listings of 44, Portugal 7 of 26, Czechia 9 of 13, Hungary 4 of 9.

The week before (23 to 29 September) read EU 7.4%, UK 8.5%, US 38.5% and 24.5% overall, so the EU figure moved down by one and a half points on a similar sample while the others held; one week is not a trend, and the series is published daily for anyone who wants to watch it.

Why remote is different. A remote listing is often written once for many countries, so the employer sidesteps a national range. Many remote roles are posted by US and UK employers hiring into Europe through contractors or employers of record, outside the directive's immediate reach. And remote boards reward volume: a listing without a salary is still a listing. Whatever the reason, the seeker's experience is the same: the roles that are easiest to apply to from anywhere are the ones least likely to say what they pay.

What this is and is not. These are listings employers chose to publish, counted as published; RemNavi does not evaluate employers. A listing counts as disclosing only when it states a range or a figure in the posting; estimated salaries supplied by boards are not counted, and listings from the paid partner feed are excluded. Rates are recomputed daily over a rolling seven-day window and are published with their sample sizes. Indeed's figures cover all job postings on Indeed and use Indeed's own method; the comparison is between two different corpora and is offered as context, not as a like-for-like measurement.

Cite this. "RemNavi Remote Job Market Index, week to 6 October 2026", CC BY 4.0. The underlying series by country is at /market-index/ and updates daily; the method is at /methodology/.