Imagine applying for a job, nailing the interview, charming the hiring manager, and then - right before signing the contract - realizing you have absolutely no idea what the salary is. Welcome to most of Europe, circa right now.
A new EU directive designed to drag salary secrecy into the sunlight hit its implementation deadline on June 7, 2026. The rules, aimed at both boosting pay transparency and closing the stubborn gender pay gap, require companies to be upfront about what jobs actually pay. Revolutionary stuff, apparently. And yet, according to Euronews, most EU member states are set to miss the deadline entirely.
So what do the rules actually say?
The directive requires employers to provide salary information to job applicants before interviews, ban asking candidates about their pay history, and give workers the right to know what their colleagues in comparable roles are earning. Companies with 100 or more employees would eventually have to report on their gender pay gap data - and face consequences if the gap exceeds 5% without justification.
The goal is to chip away at a pay gap that, across the EU, sits at around 13% according to Eurostat figures - meaning women earn roughly 87 cents for every euro a man makes. Across a career, that adds up to a staggering amount of "missing" income.
Who actually did their homework?
A small handful of member states managed to transpose the directive into national law ahead of the June 7 cutoff. The majority, however, are still working on it - or, let's be honest, staring at the assignment like it appeared overnight. Euronews notes that most countries are set to miss the deadline, which means the European Commission could theoretically initiate infringement proceedings against laggards.
Belgium and a few others had already moved toward pay transparency frameworks before the directive, giving them a head start. For most of the bloc, though, the legislative machinery simply hasn't caught up.
Why does this keep happening?
EU directives work by setting targets that member states then have to translate into their own national laws - a process that sounds straightforward until it collides with coalition governments, lobbying from employer groups, and the general chaos of national politics. Employers in several countries have also pushed back hard, arguing the reporting requirements create administrative headaches.
Workers and gender equality advocates, unsurprisingly, disagree. For them, salary secrecy has functioned as a feature, not a bug - one that consistently benefits employers over employees, and men over women.
The good news, if you want to call it that, is that the rules exist and the deadline has now passed, which increases pressure on non-compliant states. The bad news is that "pressure" in EU enforcement terms can mean years of bureaucratic back-and-forth before anything actually changes.
In the meantime, millions of Europeans will keep sending CVs into the void, hoping that whatever number eventually appears in an offer letter seems fair - with no way to check if it actually is.
