The salary transparency gap: which countries show pay in tech jobs — and which hide it

Most IT job posts still dodge one question: what does it pay? We didn't run a survey — we aggregated 63 739 live listings and simply measured which ones show an actual salary band. The breakdown is more telling than the average: by country it ranges from 0% to 58% — and the gap is explained not by culture but by law.

Who shows pay, and who hides it

The top of the list is mandatory pay transparency everywhere: the United States (state pay-transparency laws), Austria (salary-disclosure rule in the Equal Treatment Act) and Canada. At the bottom are countries with no enforced disclosure rule — there the band all but disappears.

Why? Because in 2026 it's already law

The EU Pay Transparency Directive (2023/970) transposition deadline passed on 7 June 2026. It requires that applicants learn the starting pay or band before the interview, and bans asking about prior salary. Most member states — Hungary among them — did not pass an implementing law by the deadline, so their rates sit at the bottom. Where the law is live (US, Austria), the number jumps immediately. Transparency isn't a matter of conviction — it's regulation.

What the visible bands say

An important, honest caveat: the medians below come from posted bands, and our inventory skews heavily toward senior, big-tech (mostly US) roles — so the absolute numbers run higher than a typical population average. The value isn't the exact figure, it's that it comes from real job posts, not self-reported surveys, and every row is verifiable. The European medians (Germany, Austria, France) give a more grounded picture than the US peak.

The AI premium and the remote myth

Among roles, AI/ML pays the most — meaningfully above backend. And a stubborn myth busted: remote doesn't pay less. In our data the remote median is not below the on-site one.

Remote median: €13 330/mo (n=5004) · on-site: €14 238/mo (n=10495).

Methodology

Source: Dev Radar's active, aggregated listings. Pay is normalised to monthly gross in euro (the period is never guessed — where the source gives an hourly/annual figure we convert it). Only listings in a plausible range (≈€300–60,000/mo) are included, and every breakdown states its sample size. The data is live: the figures above refresh on every load.