Nearly four in 10 UK vacancies – equating to more than 366,000 roles – are advertised without salary information, according to new research from job search engine Adzuna.
The study analysed 1.9 million UK jobs advertised during the first half of 2021 and 2020 to find out which sectors offer the most pay transparency, those that are improving, and the most opaque ones.
The figures revealed that the number of adverts not disclosing one increased between 2020 and 2021 from 35.1% to 35.5%. As many as 366,537 jobs out of 1,033,263 did not state a pay rate per month in the first half 2021, which is up from 296,327 out of 843,813 in the first part of 2020.
Scientific and quality assurance is the worst sector for transparency, with 60% not giving a salary range. More than half (55%) of retail and 53% of creative and design adverts disclose pay less than half of the time.
Conversely, the most transparent sectors are charity and voluntary at 12%, with social work (17%), manufacturing (19.8%), and logistics and warehouse (20.1%) just behind.
The research also highlighted the regions that are most and least revealing, with 73% of Northern Irish job adverts missing salary information in the first half of 2021 and 27% of ones in the East Midlands not reporting the pay.
Andrew Hunter, co-founder of Adzuna, believes this can be a “major” turn off for jobseekers who do not want to waste time applying for a role that may not pay them what they are worth.
“More seriously, it can also perpetuate existing salary biases as offers made to successful candidates for roles without published salaries are often based on existing earnings, rather than their skills and experience. This can often mean lower offers for women or ethnic minorities, perpetuating pay inequality. There is still much more that can be done to improve salary transparency across the board,” he said.