The salary range they advertise is not the range they pay

For most of working history, what people earned was a secret kept by agreement. Not by law, mostly. By habit, and by a quiet social rule that discussing your pay was rude.

That rule was never neutral. A secret that only one side of a transaction keeps is not a secret, it is an advantage. Your employer always knew what everyone earned. The habit only ever bound you.

That is now changing in law, and it is worth understanding what has actually changed, because the detail matters considerably more than the headline.

What the European rules do, and where they actually stand

The European Union adopted the Pay Transparency Directive in 2023, and the deadline for member states to write it into national law was 7 June 2026. That deadline has now passed, and most member states missed it. The picture across the twenty-seven is genuinely patchy, and anyone telling you that the whole of Europe changed on one day in June is selling you something.

Two parts of it matter to you directly as somebody applying for a job.

The first: applicants are to be told the pay or the pay range for the role before the interview, either in the advert or in advance of the conversation. You are no longer supposed to walk into a first interview blind.

The second, which fewer people have noticed and which is the bigger one: employers are not to ask about your current or previous pay.

Think about why that second rule exists. Asking what you currently earn was never really a question. It was a way of transferring the last employer's valuation of you onto the next one, including every accident that produced it: the year you joined during a hiring freeze, the promotion you did not ask for, the market that has moved since. Anyone who had ever been underpaid carried it forward for the rest of their career. Cutting that link is the most useful thing in the whole directive, and it will take longest to actually bite, because habits outlive rules.

A directive is not a law you can point at directly. It instructs each member state to pass its own version, and they have not done so at the same pace or to the same depth. So check your own country, and check it rather than relying on a summary. What you are looking for is narrow and quick to establish: does the range have to be published, when do they have to tell you, and are they allowed to ask your current salary.

In the United States there is no national rule and probably will not be one soon. Instead there are state laws, and the list of states requiring a range in the posting keeps growing. Some require it only on request, some in the advert, some only above a certain company size. The rule that applies is the one where the job is located, or in some cases where you will be working from, which for remote roles gets interesting.

Elsewhere, transparency is arriving through pressure rather than law. Job boards show estimated ranges. Employees post their numbers publicly. Nobody passed a rule, but the secret leaked anyway, and once a number is out it does not go back in.

The part almost everyone gets wrong

Here is what all of that changes, and what it does not.

You will often know the range before you speak to anyone. That is new, and it changes what preparation means: it is no longer about guessing the number, but about working out where in the range you should sit and why, which is a completely different and much more answerable question.

But the range they publish is not the range they pay.

A published range has to survive contact with several audiences at once. It has to cover the most junior person they might hire and the most senior. It has to be defensible if an existing employee reads it and compares it to their own pay. It has to leave room for a candidate who turns out to be exceptional. It is written by people whose job is to avoid problems, not to tell you what they will pay you.

So a range of, say, sixty to eighty tells you roughly this. Sixty is what they would pay someone they are taking a risk on. Eighty is what they would pay someone who walks in already doing the job at a higher level, and it may exist mostly so the band does not have to be reopened later. The realistic hiring range is narrower than the published one and usually sits below the midpoint, because most hires are not exceptional and most budgets are set before the person is found.

Your job is to work out three things: where the real range sits, where in it you land, and whether there is anything about this particular hire that would let them go higher.

Where to find the real number

People who left. The single best source and the most underused. Someone who worked there and has moved on has no reason to protect the number and no risk in telling you. One honest conversation with a former employee is worth twenty salary websites. Look for people who held your target role in the last two years and have since left, and ask them directly. Most people say yes to a short, specific, respectful question, and the wording that works is boring and honest: you are interviewing for a role, you would rather not waste anyone's time on the money, and you would be grateful for a sense of what the band really paid.

People who are still there. Less reliable, because they have something at stake, but valuable for a different reason: they know where in the band people actually sit, and whether anyone joins at the top.

The company's own adverts, over time. Look at how the same role has been advertised over the last two years. If the range has moved, that tells you about budget pressure. If the same role has been advertised three times in eighteen months, that tells you something considerably more useful: they are struggling to fill it or struggling to keep someone in it, and either one is leverage.

Public salary data. Use it as a sanity check rather than a source. It is self-reported, skewed towards people who enjoy reporting, often out of date, and it usually mixes levels that are not the same level. It will tell you whether you are in the right postcode. It will not tell you the street.

The recruiter. Yes, actually. Recruiters will often tell you the real range if you ask in a way that makes it easy to answer. The question that works is not "what does it pay". It is: "where in the published range would somebody with my experience typically land, and what would somebody at the top of that range be bringing that I am not?" The second half is the useful half. You have asked them to describe the gap between you and the top, which gives you something to close, and you have made it a conversation about fit rather than about money.

Reading the advert like a document

Before you speak to anyone, read the advert as a document rather than a description.

• A wide range means the level is not settled. That is good news, because it means the level is negotiable, and level is where the real money is.
• A narrow range means a rigid band. Do not spend your effort on base pay. Spend it on everything else in the package.
• No range at all, in a place where one is required, is worth noticing. It might be an oversight. It might tell you what their internal processes are like.
• "Depending on experience" is an invitation. They have told you the number is a function of something, and the something is what you are about to spend the interview demonstrating.

Where you actually land

Now the uncomfortable part. Asked where they fall in a range, most people place themselves near the top. Most people are not near the top. The top of a band is usually occupied by people who have done the job for years and who solve problems in that company's specific mess without needing help.

Being wrong in either direction costs you. Aim too high with nothing behind it and you look like someone who has not understood the role, which is expensive in a way you never get to see. Aim too low and you leave money that nobody will ever offer back.

So do this instead of guessing. Take the job description and mark every requirement one of three ways: I have done exactly this, I have done something close, I have not done this. Count them.

• Mostly the first group: you are in the upper half of the band, and you can say why, with examples.
• Mostly the second: you are near the middle, and the middle is not a failure. It is an accurate reading you can build on.
• Mostly the third: the conversation you should be having is about the level, not the number.

That exercise takes twenty minutes and it does something no amount of confidence coaching can. It gives you evidence, in your own words, that a recruiter can carry upward to the person who actually approves the money.

Do not expect the rules to negotiate for you

There is a period, and we are in it, where the rules exist on paper and the habits have not caught up. Recruiters trained for fifteen years to ask about current salary will ask about current salary. Adverts will carry ranges so wide they tell you nothing, because forty to ninety is technically compliant and practically useless.

What the rules have done is remove your excuse for not knowing the number, and put the burden back where it can actually be acted on, which is on your preparation.

This is general information about how pay ranges and pay transparency rules work, not legal advice. The rules differ by country and by state, and several are still changing; check the position where the job is actually located.

This article is drawn from Ask for More.