Europe legislated pay transparency. Two months on, the ads still do not show the pay.

A deadline almost nobody met

Directive (EU) 2023/970 obliged all 27 member states to write pay transparency into national law by 7 June 2026. Among its provisions: an employer must tell an applicant the pay level or range before the first interview, normally in the vacancy itself, and may not ask what the candidate earned before.

Only four states transposed in full by the deadline — Slovakia, Italy, Lithuania and Malta. Three more were partial. Ten had a draft; ten had nothing. Germany, Spain and Sweden were in the last group. The Netherlands, Sweden, Czechia and Denmark have since confirmed dates in January 2027. The Commission declined to extend the deadline and has signalled infringement proceedings.

What the job ads actually say

That is the law on paper. Here is the market. Of the 15 EU cities in our aggregate today, eight display no advertised median salary at all: Dublin, Berlin, Munich, Lisbon, Milan, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Brussels. Seven display one.

The interesting part is that the two lists do not line up. Milan shows no advertised pay, and Italy is one of the four states that transposed on time. Madrid and Barcelona do show pay, and Spain had not even published a draft. Whatever is driving disclosure in these postings right now, it is not the legal status of the member state. Law changes the obligation; it has not yet changed the copy.

The same silence, in remote work

Pay is not the only thing the ads leave out. Across the same 3,927 openings, 15% are flagged remote-eligible, and that average conceals two markets: 17 cities sit at exactly zero, 14 at half or more.

An independent reading points the same way. US telework has held near 24% for two years while job postings continue to tilt on-site — employers advertising for the office while their own staff work otherwise. Two different instruments, one finding: the posting is a weaker description of the job than we treat it as, on pay and on place alike.

Meanwhile, demand rotated hard toward engineering

The macro backdrop is cautious. US employers added 44,000 jobs in July, against about 75,000 expected and 98,000 in June. Postings are down year on year across major markets — roughly 23% in the US and 25% in France. Global unemployment is forecast flat at 4.9%, with the ILO putting the wider jobs gap at 408 million.

Our own pool moved the other way, and its composition moved faster than its size. Openings rose to 3,927, up 1.6% in a day. But Python went from 26 to 40 mentions and TypeScript from 10 to 17, while Amazon Web Services and JavaScript entered the top eight and Photoshop and Illustrator dropped out of it entirely. Anthropic and Rippling entered the top five hirers; Databricks and Block left. This is the two-speed market in one snapshot: broad caution, narrow and intense demand.

• Skills named in listings, 6 to 7 August 2026
• Leadership — 69 → 52down
• Python — 26 → 40up
• Communication — 40 → 31down
• TypeScript — 10 → 17up
• Project Management — 14 → 16up
• Amazon Web Services — 15new to the top eight
• Accounting — 10 → 15up
• JavaScript — 13new to the top eight

A correction, and what it is worth

Yesterday this desk reported that Britain's advertised medians were inverted — London lowest of the three UK cities at GBP 40,000, Birmingham highest at GBP 46,500. Today the same pages read London GBP 54,500 and Birmingham GBP 30,000. The finding did not weaken; it reversed, in twenty-four hours.

The explanation is the subject of this piece. A median computed over the few listings that disclose pay moves violently when that handful changes. So we are retiring day-over-day salary comparisons: this desk will report advertised pay as a level with its disclosure rate attached, not as a trend. When eight of fifteen European cities publish nothing, the honest headline is about the silence, not about the number.