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 Job Lobster 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
Job Lobster 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 Job Lobster’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?
Job Lobster 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 "Job Lobster analysis of 558,596 live job postings, July 2026" and link this page. Custom cuts (by state, industry, or seniority): hello@joblobster.ai.