A new pay transparency law could soon require UK businesses to publish salary ranges in every job advert.
The Cabinet Office’s Equal Pay and Pay Discrimination consultation, launched in mid-July 2026, proposes a statutory requirement for employers in England, Wales and Scotland to publish salary information in job adverts, with details on exact figures, ranges or “benchmark rates” still to be settled. It closes on 27 October 2026.
Christopher Wright, Head of People at Harrison Holidays, a family-owned holiday park business of 257 employees, says his company publishes pay bands already – and advises other businesses to do the same.
“You’re only opening yourself up to further discrepancies in pay if you don’t advertise,” Christopher says. “It’s understood that eight in 10 candidates will not apply for a role if a salary nowadays is not advertised,” he adds, pointing out that candidates are already treating transparency as the baseline, whether or not the law catches up.
The UK Pay Transparency Law Consultation, Explained
The proposals sit inside a wider reform of equal pay law, and would also let officials ask industry groups whether bonuses and other benefits should be disclosed alongside base salary. The Cabinet Office argues that transparency curbs the kind of unconscious bias that creeps in “when pay is opaque”, and that employers who don’t publish a job advert would still have to share salary information with candidates before interview. CIPD research has found that only 41% of UK employers always share salary ranges in external job adverts, and that even those who do disclose aren’t always fully transparent, sometimes advertising ranges more than £10,000 wide.
Bill Robertson, founder of reward consultancy EasyGrading and a chartered fellow of the CIPD, has watched this play out from the other side of the table. As someone who works with organisations ranging from around 50 employees to 18,000, helping them design pay structures, manage job evaluation and benchmark roles against the market, he says: “One of the problems with transparency is that it can be quite complex to those that are not reward professionals,” he says. “How do you get job information in a way that can be easily understood? I think that’s a pretty key thing in terms of making transparency work.”
Why Some UK Businesses Already Practise Salary Transparency
Speaking of his time with a previous employer, where a pay gap inadvertently opened up between two colleagues, Christopher points out that “there wouldn’t have needed to have been a discrepancy and a potential grievance situation if we’d have outlaid that from the get-go”.
For employers in situations where training requirements mean the same jobs have different pay levels, or where someone’s experience justifies a higher salary than a colleague doing the same role, Christopher suggests laying out banding for each role and being explicit about how that banding was reached, rather than leaving candidates guessing. “Nobody wants to apply for a job and it’s 30 to 50k, or what dictates what that extra 20k is worth, is it the experience or whatever,” he says. That same clarity, he argues, extends to people already inside the organisation: staff who can see internal vacancies advertised and paid fairly are more likely to trust that their own progression will be handled the same way. “It’s not really just about the candidates, but actually the employees within the organisation,” he says.
The Job Evaluation Gap Facing Pay Transparency in the UK
Bill sees a bit more of a divide among his clients. “Clients who would use job evaluation generally have an advantage,” he says, because it leaves “a record of information” that can justify a pay decision years later, something he pushes clients to maintain properly rather than treat as a box-ticking exercise.
“Sometimes clients kind of want to get the job done and then move on to the next task,” he says, and it’s only later that “people come back and say, well, what was the reason for that decision?”
Organisations without that system, he warns, “may find some aspects of the transparency proposals challenging, time consuming, potentially costly”, regardless of what the Government ultimately requires.
Some of that hesitation is commercial rather than philosophical: employment lawyer Dónall Breen of Littler has told Personnel Today that employers “fear that publishing pay details in job adverts will help their competitors poach their staff.” Bill has heard the same concern directly from clients, particularly those competing for talent in a specific location or a narrow sector, where a handful of local rivals can see exactly what a business is paying.
“That’s when they get very concerned about confidentiality,” he says. “But to me that’s just an economic consideration.”
Employers with operations in Europe, he notes, are already further along, having had to reckon with the EU’s pay transparency directive well before the UK proposals emerged. For those without that exposure, the practicalities are still being worked out, which raises the important question of whether smaller businesses with different needs to larger organisations are being adequately considered.
What Transparency Changes, and What It Doesn’t
While transparency is generally welcomed by many, Bill is skeptical that publishing a number alone will be sufficient as a means of reducing inequality in the workplace.
“I don’t think transparency in itself will deliver the solution,” he says. “But if it’s combined with other things, then I think it’s got a chance of working.” His expectation is that the Government will build in some form of governance or oversight structure to accompany any disclosure requirement, rather than leave employers to publish a figure with no accountability attached to how it was set.
If that transparency does take hold broadly, Bill expects it to change what candidates weigh up, not just what they see. “It’s likely that a salary will find its natural level in a market,” he says, and that “will simply change the emphasis away from solely pay, to other parts of the package: the employer itself, their reputation, working conditions, flexibility.” Base salary will still matter more at junior levels than senior ones, he says, but for a growing share of candidates, the number on the advert is only the starting point for a wider judgment about the employer behind it.
Whatever the consultation ultimately settles on, businesses have until 27 October 2026 to make their case for what that number should look like, and how it should be explained.
For more information about the consultation, click here:
