The best and worst sectors, regions and cities for pay transparency revealed

• 4 in 10 UK jobs ads posted without a salary, despite calls for better pay transparency
• Scientific & QA, Retail, and Creative & Design are the worst offenders; Charity & Voluntary, Social Work, and Manufacturing are most transparent on pay
• Skills shortage sectors Logistics & Warehouse and Healthcare & Nursing becoming more open about pay to try and attract new talent
• Northern Ireland is the least transparent UK region with 73% of job ads missing vital salary data; East Midlands is most transparent with 27.1% of ads lacking a salary
• Belfast, Salford and London are the most secretive cities, while Swindon, Rochdale and Preston are most transparent
• Companies championing transparency in UK include Desana, MadeTech & Codurance

Nearly 4 in 10 UK job ads, over 366,000 jobs, are advertised without a salary despite growing calls for pay transparency, according to new research from smarter job search engine Adzuna. 

The research analysed 1.9 million UK job ads advertised in H1 2021 and H1 2020 to highlight the sectors offering the greatest salary transparency, those that are improving, and the biggest offenders.

Despite growing calls for pay transparency, the proportion of job ads not disclosing a salary increased between 2020 and 2021 from 35.1% to 35.5%. A total of 366,537 jobs from 1,033,263 failed to disclose a salary per month in H1 2021, up from 296,327 out of 843,813 in H1 2020.

Scientific & QA tops the list as the worst offending sector, with a whopping 6 out of 10 job ads (60.3%) not giving a salary range. Retail (55.1%) and Creative & Design (52.5%) also disclose salaries less than half of the time.

By comparison, the most transparent sectors are Charity & Voluntary (just 11.6% of job ads without a salary), Social work (16.5%), Manufacturing (19.8%), and Logistics & Warehouse (20.1%).

In cases where salaries aren’t posted online, jobseekers can use Adzuna’s jobsworth tool to receive an estimate of the salary they can expect from a role, simply by entering the job description of the role they’re applying for.

Skills shortage sectors improve salary transparency

Salary transparency has improved within several sectors struggling to hire, as employers work harder to attract new talent.

Logistics & Warehouse has seen the biggest improvement, with the proportion of job ads without a salary falling 16.3 percentage points year-on-year from 36.4% to 20.1%. The last week of August (23rd - 29th) saw 106,072 advertised vacancies in this sector, up from 45,867 in the same week last year. Some employers are going even further and offering significant cash signing bonuses, for example Amazon is offering £1,000 to new UK joiners.

Healthcare & Nursing has also made strides towards more transparency, with the number of job ads without a salary falling 14.9 percentage points year-on-year from 43.8% to 28.9%. Hospitality & Catering, another sector struggling to fill roles, has also seen improvements, down 3.4 percentage points to 45.3%, but there remains plenty of room for improvement.

The sectors going backwards

By comparison, business services sectors including PR, Consultancy, and IT all saw a decline in pay transparency. The proportion of job ads without a salary increased 11.6 percentage points year-on-year in PR, from 38.0% to 49.6%. Just behind, the proportion of Consultancy job ads without a salary rose 11.4 percentage points from 36.9% to 48.3%. Customer Services (up 11.3pp) and IT (up 10.9pp) also saw falling rates of salary disclosure.

Andrew Hunter, co-founder of job search engine Adzuna, comments: "Four out of ten UK job ads are still being posted without a salary range, despite calls for greater pay transparency. This can be a major turn off for jobseekers who don't want to waste time applying for a role that may not pay them what they’re worth. More seriously, it can also perpetuate existing salary biases as offers made to successful candidates for roles without published salaries are often based on existing earnings, rather than their skills and experience. This can often mean lower offers for women or ethnic minorities, perpetuating pay inequality.

“We’ve seen positive progress in industries that are struggling to hire, with the Logistics & Warehouse and Healthcare & Nursing sectors getting better at publishing pay rates. But there is still much more that can be done to improve salary transparency across the board.”

The most secretive UK regions and cities

The research also analysed the regions and cities that are most and least transparent on pay. Northern Ireland is the biggest perpetrator, with 72.7% of job ads missing vital salary information in H1 2021. Scotland and London were also top offenders, with 46.4% and 46.0% of job ads omitting pay ranges respectively.

The East Midlands is the most transparent region with just 27.1% of job ads missing salary information.

Delving deeper into city data, Belfast is by far the most secretive city in the UK, with 86.3% of job ads omitting salary data, followed by Salford (49.6%) and London (46.0%). By contrast, Swindon is most upfront about pay, disclosing a salary in all but 17.6% of job ads. Rochdale (22.1%) and Preston (22.4%) round out the top three most transparent UK cities.

The most transparent employers

Several US tech giants have shouted loudly for some time about the benefits of pay transparency, including Buffer,  GitLab and Tandem, and this trend is now crossing the pond to the UK. 

UK-based companies leading the charge on salary transparency, include:

• MadeTech, which publishes its salary banding as part of its GitHub handbook. 
• London, Manchester and Barcelona based tech company Codurance, which has opened up company finances and salary bandings. It has also removed hierarchies by cutting out manager roles. 
• Dating app Feeld which offers transparent salaries and equity. 
• Edinburgh, London and Stockholm based software company Desana which offers transparent salaries and career progression as well as a publicly available Salary & EMI Options calculator.

Andrew Hunter, co-founder of job search engine Adzuna, comments: “Buffer started the movement for pay transparency and now several other European start-ups are sitting up and taking notice. In a jobs market where talent is in hot demand and a lot of companies are fishing in the same ponds for skilled workers, making salaries publicly available can work as a major recruitment draw. It’s also a great way to eliminate bias and close gender and ethnicity pay gaps. As a society, we’re moving towards greater transparency - ethnicity reporting is set to be the next big trend - so we expect open salaries to become even more widespread.”

Vicky Vitkay, general manager of Work in Startups, comments: "Salaries can be a bit of a taboo topic, but transparency could be a great way to gain some competitive advantage for attracting and retaining people. It seems to be those companies who choose to be transparent are the ones actively trying to close the pay gap which is great, however with fewer women in higher positions there's a lack of evidence on whether this can in fact make a positive impact."

Table 1: Proportion of jobs without a salary -- by industry

Table 2: Proportion of jobs without a salary -- by region

Table 3: The 10 cities most secretive about pay

Table 4: The 10 cities most transparent about pay

To try out Adzuna’s Jobsworth tool, please visit: https://www.adzuna.co.uk/jobs/salary-predictor.html