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Salary transparency in job postings is becoming more common, but at a slower rate, potentially affected by economic factors, according to new data from Indeed.
Zoom in. Salary transparency has been on the rise since 2019 when fewer than 25% of job postings on Indeed included any compensation information. In September, 57.8% of US job postings on the site “contained some salary information,” a 5.6% increase from 2023, but a slowdown from 2022, when there was a 15.7% rise. The slower growth could be a result of the sluggish labor market.
Job postings in certain industries, including childcare, personal care, home health, and security were more likely to contain salary information, while those in the medical field and civil engineering tended to have fewer compensation details.
Employers in states with transparency laws—like New York, Hawaii, and Maryland—were more likely to include salary information in job postings. States with wage transparency laws also saw the greatest YoY growth. One-quarter of US workers now live in an area with pay transparency rules.
Big picture. Despite pay transparency legislation, the gender pay gap widened in 2023, for the first time in two decades. Women earned 83% of what men made, down from 84% in 2022. The gap is even wider for women of color.
While many economists believe the laws are necessary for change, there are limits to success. Enforcement of the rules is limited, as individuals are not allowed to directly file suits against companies that do not comply. Some companies also skirt the laws by sharing salary ranges too wide for applicants to discern the actual pay.
Some experts also believe that employers must do more to ensure pay equity and parity by modifying their compensation packages and conducting internal pay equity audits, HR Brew previously reported.
“HR should be tracking requests, tracking responses, justifying these decisions…and making sure that it’s not [that] the identical ask is being responded to differently for men versus women,” Laura Kray, a psychologist at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, previously told HR Brew.