Salary Range Now Mandatory in Job Ads: What You Must Show in 2026 (and When)

You have read it somewhere, or heard it at an employer event: soon there has to be a salary in your job ad. No more "competitive salary" or "salary to be discussed", but a real figure or a real band. Two questions tend to linger. From when does this apply to me? And, trickier: which figure do I put there?

This article answers both. First the timing, because there is a lot of confusion about it. Then the part most articles skip: not that you have to show a range, but how you arrive at a range that holds up when someone asks about it.

"Competitive" no longer counts

The EU Pay Transparency Directive (Directive (EU) 2023/970) changes one thing fundamentally about how you hire. Vague wording about pay is no longer enough. Concretely that means:

• Every job ad carries a pay figure or a pay band, before the interview.
• You may no longer ask a candidate what they earn now or earned before.
• On request, you must be able to explain the objective, gender-neutral criteria your pay rests on.

"Competitive" was the safe default phrase for years. It says nothing and commits to nothing. That is exactly why it can no longer stand: it dodges the very transparency the law sets out to enforce. You will have to name a figure, and you will have to be able to back up where that figure comes from.

From when does this apply?

This is where most of the noise sits, so to be precise. The EU deadline to transpose the directive into national law was 7 June 2026. That date has passed, and most member states did not meet it. Only a handful had fully implemented by the deadline; many, including the Netherlands, Germany, France and Spain, are still finalising their national laws, with several targeting 1 January 2027.

That sounds like a reprieve. Yet waiting until your national law lands is unwise, for three reasons.

1. The directive already has effect. If you work for or with larger or international clients, they are already asking for transparent ranges across their supply chain. And a directive whose deadline has passed can already weigh as an interpretive frame in disputes before the national law is finalised.
2. Candidates already expect it. Job ads with a salary band attract more and better applicants. In a tight market, hiding it makes you stand out, and not in a good way.
3. A defensible structure is not built in a week. This is the real reason. Inventing a figure can happen today. A figure that holds up needs substantiation, and you arrange that more calmly in advance than in a panic just before the deadline.

What exactly goes in the job ad?

At minimum a salary band (a lower and upper bound) or a starting figure for the role. No open ends, no "depending on experience" without numbers.

But the job-ad line is the visible tip. Underneath sits the question you really have to be able to answer: why this band? The directive names four factors on which you weigh a role and justify the level:

1. Skills and knowledge (education, experience, certifications, languages)
2. Effort (complexity, problem-solving, load)
3. Responsibility (people, budget, scope, impact)
4. Working conditions (shifts, travel, physical demands)

Those four factors are not just the method behind the figure, they are the document you must be able to make available. A band without that reasoning is a figure with no backing.

The hard part is not showing a range, but having one that is right

This is where most small employers get stuck. A job-ad line with a band is quickly typed. But the moment an applicant, a current employee or an inspector asks why that band runs from X to Y, and not higher or lower, there has to be an answer that survives scrutiny.

Lining up a few competitor ads is not substantiation, they are loose data points. Picking a figure yourself because it "feels logical" is precisely the arbitrariness the law sets out to remove. And if you estimate several roles separately, sooner or later they contradict each other: one role ends up illogically higher than another, and your whole story collapses.

Large companies buy expensive benchmark data and hire a comp specialist for this. The small and mid-sized company, five to a hundred people, does not have that. It is exactly that group the law touches on job-ad transparency, without the means the large players do have.

How to arrive at a defensible range fast

That is what we built loontransparantie.aycabtu.com for. Not figures scraped from other people's job ads, but the same method a consultancy uses: weighing your role on the four legal factors and turning that into a substantiated band.

• Paste in your job ad or role profile. The tool extracts the level, scope and required skills and maps them onto the four factors.
• You confirm and correct. The completed form is your compliance document straight away: the objective criteria you must be able to make available.
• You get a substantiated band. Minimum, median and maximum with steps, the criteria the band rests on, a collective-agreement note, a ready-to-use salary line for your ad, and source references.

Want to see what that looks like first? Take a look at the example job structure of an installation SME with five roles.

What it costs

Your first role analysis is free, no strings attached. After that, a single analysis is 24.95 euro, no subscription. Want your whole company mapped, then there are packages from 395 euro, including the Pay Rationale: a downloadable PDF with the method, the weighted scores per role and the criteria per grade. That is the document you hand over when someone challenges your pay policy. A consultancy charges many times that for the same work.

The bottom line

The salary range in your job ad is not a formality you sort out on the last day of the year. The visible figure is easy, the reasoning underneath is the work. Start there now, calmly and at your own pace, and it stands well before the law arrives.

Set your first defensible salary range, free →