Dive Brief:
- Job postings that list some type of pay information continue to increase, but the momentum is slowing: 57.8% of all U.S. postings on Indeed in September contained some pay information, compared to 52.2% last year, according to an Oct. 23 story from Indeed’s Hiring Lab.
- Child care jobs remained the most transparent, with 81.7% of postings listing salary information; personal care/home health and security/public safety followed (74.5% and 74.1%, respectively), Hiring Lab’s analysis found.
- The least salary transparent professions were in the medical field, with pay information in postings for physicians and surgeons at the bottom (39.1%), below medical technicians (44.6%), medical information jobs (45%) and civil and industrial engineers (45.3% and 46.9%, respectively).
Dive Insight:
Salary transparency laws seem to be effective: Pay transparency has grown considerably in job postings as more states and metro areas pass legislation requiring it, Hiring Lab economist Daniel Culbertson wrote in the post.
For instance, the three states/localities with the largest gains in salary transparency of the past year — Hawaii, Washington, D.C., and New York — are also those in which pay transparency laws have taken effect around this time, Indeed’s research arm pointed out.
In Maryland, the most recent state to enact legislation, transparency rose by 14.5 percentage points between September 2023 and September 2024 — even though the law didn’t take effect until Oct. 1, Hiring Lab found. This indicates employers may have made preemptive changes to become compliant, Culbertson said.
Recent studies confirm how influential the laws have been. More than 70% of North American employers surveyed by WTW said regulatory requirements drove their pay transparency programs, the firm announced in September.
That salary transparency growth is slowing could be attributed to at least two factors, Culbertson explained.
“For one, salary transparency laws in large states like California and New York (which account for a substantial share of US job postings) have been in effect for over a year now, leaving less incremental growth from changes to laws in smaller states,” he wrote.
Also, the labor market has slowed, and “competition for workers has eased somewhat, potentially leaving employers feeling less urgency to attract candidates by stating pay information directly in job postings,” Culbertson pointed out.
To meet equity and transparency goals, many U.S. and Canadian organizations said in late 2023 they were considering market-based pay ranges, although traditional pay grades remained the most common form of pay structure, according to a Payscale report released earlier this year.
Around 4 in 10 of the respondents said they priced pay by targeting the middle of the market, Payscale found. However, top-performing organizations were more likely to pay above-market, it said.
As part of their pay transparency practices, more than half of the respondents in the WTW survey said they implemented measures for communicating job levels, pay opportunities and how base pay is determined.
The Hiring Lab analysis found that almost every sector has seen some degree of growth in salary transparency. Pharmacy job postings notched the most substantial gain, rising 24 percentage points from September 2023 to September 2024 (from 46.5% to 70.4%).
Production and manufacturing had the smallest change, inching up a mere 1.3 percentage points, while salary information in postings for food preparation and services jobs dipped 2.1 percentage points and 2.7 percentage points in the driving sector.
Hiring Lab also found regional differences in pay transparency, with it being less common in the South, and generally more common in the West, a region that includes states with existing pay transparency laws, like California, Colorado and Washington, Culbertson noted.
