Which job adverts say what they pay

We read 1,702,230 open job adverts off employers' own career pages and counted the ones that name a figure. 648,659 do — 38.1%. Here is who, and where, and how much of it the law explains.

Counted 2026-10-28. Rebuilt nightly.

The same company, two different answers

Fourteen US jurisdictions require the pay range to appear in the advert itself. Comparing those states with the rest is easy and proves little: they do not hire for the same work in the same proportions. So this compares each employer with itself — the 397 firms that post at least 100 adverts on both sides of the line, counted separately on each side.

67%of their adverts state pay where the law requires it (146,202 of 217,648)

38%of their adverts state pay where it does not (120,338 of 314,614)

Same companies, same week, same jobs: 29 points apart. Whatever else moves a firm to publish a salary, the requirement moves it most.

Every US state, ranked

§ marks a state whose law puts the range in the advert. All 14 of them finish in the top 15 of 51.

The bottom 10 — Mississippi, Alaska, Louisiana, Wyoming, West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Montana, Tennessee, Arkansas — require nothing of an advert. North Dakota is the clearest exception the other way: nothing is asked of an advert there, and 57% of them answer anyway.

Canada

British Columbia and Ontario put the range in the advert. They are the only two provinces that do.

Around the world

No within-employer control here, and the gaps are far too large for custom and law to be separated:

The cities doing most of the hiring

By kind of work

Healthcare & Care names a figure in 47% of adverts and Food & Hospitality in 27.1% — a gap of 1.7×. A narrower spread than the map has, and it does not follow what the work pays: the two trading-floor categories are near the foot of it.

The employers that never say, and the ones that always do

Of 1,057 employers with at least 300 adverts read, these are the largest at each extreme. The count beside each is adverts whose description we hold and have read — an employer whose text we failed to fetch is not an employer that declined to answer, so it is not on this list.

How a figure is given when it is given

50% of the adverts that state pay state an hourly rate (326,424 of 648,659): this is the whole labour market, not the salaried part of it. And 172,469 of them (27%) give one number rather than a range.

Where there is a range, the typical one runs from its floor to 1.23× that floor — a band of about 23%. 4.4% are wider than double, which is a way of answering the question without answering it.

What the figures come to, annualised

The midpoint of each stated band, converted to a yearly figure but never between currencies. Not a measure of national pay — it is a measure of pay in the jobs that publish a number.

How this was counted

Numbers wrong? A law listed that should not be, or missing one that should? Tell us and we will fix it and say so.

The jobs behind the numbers

Every kind of work · Every employer A–Z · Search all 1,890,599 open roles