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.
| City | Advertised median | National status |
|---|---|---|
| Milan | none shown | transposed on time |
| Dublin | none shown | partial |
| Brussels | none shown | partial |
| Berlin | none shown | delayed, no draft |
| Munich | none shown | delayed, no draft |
| Stockholm | none shown | delayed to Jan 2027 |
| Copenhagen | none shown | delayed to Jan 2027 |
| Lisbon | none shown | — |
| Madrid | EUR 28,500 | delayed, no draft |
| Barcelona | EUR 37,500 | delayed, no draft |
| Lyon | EUR 32,000 | — |
| Amsterdam | EUR 40,500 | delayed to Jan 2027 |
| Paris | EUR 50,000 | — |
| Vienna | EUR 65,000 | — |
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.
Every market figure here is a page you can open. Start with the market by city and read your own.
The markets in this piece, live
Earlier editions
- · 7 min readHealth care and social assistance out-hired the whole US economyIn the twelve months to September 2026, health care and social assistance added 520,400 jobs to American payrolls, and the whole economy added 496,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ figures published on 2 October 2026. The survey’s twelve sectors add up to the total, so every other sector together lost 24,400 jobs over the year: private employers outside health care and social assistance added 191,600, and government lost 216,000, with federal employment down 232,000. Health care alone added 371,800, three quarters of the economy’s gain. Information lost 120,000 jobs and financial activities 107,000. September itself added 29,000, and payrolls fell in four of the twelve months.Read the analysis
- · 8 min readAustralia’s unemployed per vacancy is below any pre-2021 quarterAustralia had 2.2 unemployed people for every job vacancy in August 2026, by the desk’s count from two Australian Bureau of Statistics surveys. In the 162 quarters with a figure from 1979 to 2020, the lowest was 2.5, in February 2008; all 21 quarters below 2.2 came after May 2021. The ratio is rising again: it was 2.0 a year earlier, and the number of unemployed rose by 80,000 while vacancies barely moved. Vacancies, at 325,000, are still 46% above August 2019, when the ratio was 3.2. In seven of the eight states and territories the ratio is lower than in August 2019; Queensland went from 4.3 to 2.0, and the one rise, in the Australian Capital Territory, is within the survey’s margin of error.Read the analysis
- · 9 min readA Luxembourg jobseeker keeps under a tenth of new payA single person who leaves unemployment benefit for a job paying two thirds of the average wage ends up better off by 9.35% of the job’s gross pay in Luxembourg and by 46.24% in Ireland, according to Eurostat’s figures for 2025, published on 1 October 2026. The rest, 90.65% and 53.76%, goes in the tax and social contributions the job brings and the benefits that stop. Ten of the 27 member states take more than 80%; the European Union as a whole takes 74.5%. The figures come from a tax and benefit model applied to one illustrative person, not from a survey, and they can be compared only from 2024, when the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre took the calculation over from the OECD. Between 2024 and 2025 the rate rose most in Italy, by 4.14 points, and fell most in Slovenia, by 3.09.Read the analysis
