The Salary Transparency Report: who shows the money in 2026
Pay-transparency laws keep spreading, yet most job ads still hide the number. We counted salary disclosure across all 558,596 live postings in the JobLobster corpus — by work mode and by profession — plus the median posted pay where bands exist.
Key findings
- 41.9% of active postings disclose a salary band — majority opacity, three years into the transparency-law era.
- Remote employers are ~1.5× more transparent than on-site ones: 55.8% of remote listings show pay vs 38.5% of on-site listings (hybrid: 51.1%).
- Education discloses most (57.3%); the generic professional bucket least (34.4%). Tech is NOT the transparency leader — software engineering sits near the bottom at 38.4%.
- Median posted midpoints range from $170K (data & AI) to $67K (education) among USD postings with bands.
Transparency by work mode
The starkest split in the data. Remote employers compete everywhere at once — and price like it. On-site employers still treat pay as a secret to be surrendered in a phone screen.
| Work mode | Share |
|---|---|
| Remote | 55.8% |
| Hybrid | 51.1% |
| On-site | 38.5% |
Transparency by profession
Education’s lead reflects public-sector pay scales; sales and product management lead the private pack. The professions writing the most job ads — the generic professional bucket and software engineering — are among the least transparent.
| Profession | Share |
|---|---|
| Education | 57.3% |
| Product management | 52.4% |
| Design | 52% |
| Social impact & public sector | 51.8% |
| Sales | 50.7% |
| Legal & compliance | 50.6% |
| Marketing | 48.7% |
| Construction & built environment | 46.6% |
| Security | 46.2% |
| Customer success | 45.4% |
| Healthcare | 45.3% |
| Data & AI | 45.2% |
| Finance & accounting | 42.3% |
| Science & biotech | 40.4% |
| Operations | 40.2% |
| Software engineering | 38.4% |
| People & HR | 37.8% |
| General professional | 34.4% |
Where a posting sits matters as much as what profession it’s in: metros in pay-transparency-law states disclose at 70% vs 44% elsewhere — the full state-by-state and metro league tables are in the companion study, Do pay-transparency laws work?
Median posted pay by profession
Among USD postings that disclose a band, the median midpoint (in thousands):
| Profession | Share |
|---|---|
| Data & AI | 170K USD |
| Product management | 168K USD |
| Security | 165K USD |
| Software engineering | 163K USD |
| Legal & compliance | 163K USD |
| Design | 162K USD |
| Marketing | 136K USD |
| Social impact & public sector | 128K USD |
| Customer success | 125K USD |
| People & HR | 125K USD |
| Finance & accounting | 118K USD |
| Sales | 116K USD |
| Operations | 109K USD |
| Media & creative | 108K USD |
| Healthcare | 103K USD |
| Construction & built environment | 101K USD |
| Education | 67K USD |
Methodology
JobLobster maintains a live index of job postings pulled directly from public employer applicant-tracking-system feeds (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workday and others) — primary-source ads, not scraped aggregator copies. This analysis covers all 558,596 postings active in the corpus during the first week of July 2026. Professions come from JobLobster’s deterministic role classifier; work modes from posting metadata (postings with unknown mode are excluded from mode shares); salary figures use only postings that disclose numeric bands. The corpus skews toward North American professional roles; percentages describe this corpus, not the entire global labor market. Full AI-skills companion study: AI skills in job postings, 2026.
“The Salary Transparency Report, July 2026” — analysis of 558,596 live job postings, July 2026. Link: https://joblobster.ai/research/salary-transparency-2026. Custom cuts for journalists: hello@joblobster.ai.
Questions
Where does this data come from?
JobLobster indexes live postings directly from employer applicant-tracking-system feeds. This study counts the 233,998 of 558,596 active postings (July 2026) that publish a numeric salary band — what employers actually disclose, not what surveys say they disclose.
Why are remote employers more transparent?
Remote employers compete across state and national lines, where pay-transparency laws increasingly apply to any posting a covered candidate can see — and where hiding the band costs them candidates who have other tabs open. A business hiring on-site competes only with employers in the same metro, and opacity survives longer there.
Can I cite or republish these numbers?
Yes — cite "JobLobster analysis of 558,596 live job postings, July 2026" and link this page. Custom cuts (by state, industry, or seniority): hello@joblobster.ai.