Only 5.9% of UK job ads say what the job pays.
We analysed 8,138 live UK job ads, taken directly from 299 employers' own careers pages — not from job boards. 5.9% state a salary.
Why this dataset is different
Most salary-transparency statistics are measured on job boards — where the boards themselves inject salary estimates into ads. Ours is the employer's own careers page, verbatim: if a figure appears in our data, the employer put it there. We never estimate pay, on this page or anywhere else.
5.9%
of 8,138 live UK ads state a salary — 477 ads in total.
Even counting any ad that so much as mentions a £-figure in its body text, the ceiling is about 8.5%.
Finance is worse than tech
The industry that prices everything for a living is less likely to price its own jobs.
Share of live UK ads stating a salary, by sector. Bars scaled to the section maximum.
The junior gradient runs backwards
The people with the least knowledge of the market get the least information about it.
Share of live UK ads stating a salary, by seniority. Bars scaled to the section maximum.
Belfast: zero
Not one of Belfast's 168 live ads states a salary. Manchester leads the UK.
Share of live UK ads stating a salary, by city (cities with 100+ live ads). Bars scaled to the section maximum.
The employers doing it best
Monzo proves transparency is a choice, not an impossibility: 89.3% of its UK ads state pay. At the other end of the table, four major employers with more than 50 live UK ads each state pay in fewer than 3% of them.
Employers beating the 5.9% average, among employers with 50+ live UK ads. Bars scaled to the section maximum.
Where pay is stated, it averages £82,500
Across the 340 UK ads stating an annual figure in pounds, the median advertised midpoint is £82,500 (middle half of the range: £37,500–£135,250). Transparency today is concentrated in well-paid fintech roles — the employers with the least to hide.
Methodology
Snapshot taken 4 August 2026 from the live Morganson corpus: every open role published on the careers sites of 299 UK and European employers we crawl every two hours, filtered to roles located in the UK (8,138 ads). “States a salary” means the employer's own posting carries a stated salary figure or range — we never infer or estimate pay. As a check on that definition, we also searched the full text of every no-salary ad for any £-figure of £10,000 or more: only 2.8% contain one, and some of those are benefits budgets rather than pay. Sector, city and seniority cuts use the posting's own metadata; league tables require at least 50 live ads per employer and 100 per city. The corpus skews towards finance and technology employers and towards London, and covers employers whose careers sites are machine-readable. Questions or the underlying aggregates: hello@morganson.co.
Know what you're worth anyway.
Morganson's UK salary guides cover the ladder for every role we track, derived from ONS data — and our AI recruiter watches employers' own careers pages so you hear about the right role the day it opens.