Britain to Force Employers to Reveal Salaries in Job Adverts in ‘Say What You Pay’ Law

Britain will make it a legal requirement for employers to publish the salary in every job advert, Prime Minister Andy Burnham has announced, in a new “say what you pay” law designed to end the guessing game that confronts millions of jobseekers — above all young people looking for their first job.

The government confirmed on Thursday 5 November that it will bring forward legislation requiring employers to state what a role pays before anyone applies, ending a long-standing practice in which candidates are routinely asked to invest hours in applications, interviews and preparation without knowing whether the job would even pay enough to live on. According to Reuters, the Prime Minister’s office said the legislation would be introduced to Parliament “soon”, although no date has been set and details of the law’s scope, the precise information employers must disclose and how it will be enforced are still to be published.

“Whether you’re a young person starting out or a parent trying to support your family, you should know what a job pays before spending your time and effort applying for it,” Mr Burnham said in a statement issued by the government. “That’s why we will make it a legal requirement for all employers to say what you pay.”

The announcement was made alongside a wider push to tackle youth unemployment, including a major new work-experience commitment from Siemens Mobility, and it comes as the government prepares to receive the final report of the Milburn Review into youth inactivity, which is due in the coming weeks. Ministers say the measure will also help to close the gender pay gap by removing the secrecy around pay that campaigners say leaves women negotiating blind.

For now, the Prime Minister is calling on employers not to wait for the law. “In the meantime, the Prime Minister is calling on all businesses to say what they pay on job ads now, rather than wait for the law to change,” the government said in its announcement.

What the new law will require

Under the plans, publishing salary information in job adverts will become a legal duty for employers, with the government describing openness about pay as “the minimum standard”. The official announcement, published by GOV.UK on Thursday evening, says the change will “back employers already doing the right thing” while forcing the rest to follow.

The scale of the current problem is set out in figures from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, cited by both the government and Reuters. Only 41 per cent of employers always publish a salary range in their adverts, and fewer than one in five — 18 per cent — always publish a specific salary. That means most jobseekers in Britain are still routinely asked to apply for roles with no reliable indication of what they pay.

The government says the requirement will apply to all employers, and that where a role is not advertised publicly, the candidate must be given the pay information in writing before interview — a formulation first set out in the consultation the government launched in July. Further details on scope, the information that must be included and enforcement will be set out in due course, according to the GOV.UK announcement.

The move follows a public consultation on equal pay and pay discrimination launched on 14 July 2026 by the Office for Equality and Opportunity, which closed on 27 October. Early analysis of the responses, published by the government on Thursday, showed overwhelming support: 94 per cent of respondents backed the requirement, including 93 per cent of businesses. Ministers presented that result as evidence that the change is wanted not only by workers but by employers themselves.

Bridget Phillipson, the Minister for Women and Equalities, said the change would end a process that is “a guessing game” for applicants. “What a job pays is rightly at the forefront of people’s minds when looking for work — it shouldn’t be a guessing game,” she said. “Mandatory salary information on job adverts will help young people make informed choices, help close the gender pay gap, and tackle an everyday annoyance that can stand in the way of applying for a job.”

Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds also welcomed the measure, telling Metro that it would give everyone “a fair chance when starting their career”. “Simple barriers can get in the way, such as employers not saying how much a job pays,” he said. “People deserve to know what they could earn before spending time applying for a job, so we’re changing the law to make sure pay information is included in job adverts, helping more people get a foot in the door.”

The youth jobs crisis behind the announcement

The salary disclosure law is explicitly aimed at young people, and the figures behind that choice are stark. According to the Office for National Statistics, an estimated 981,000 people aged 16 to 24 in Britain were not in education, employment or training — known as NEET — in April to June 2026, representing 13 per cent of the age group, or roughly one in eight young people. In the previous quarter, January to March 2026, the figure passed one million — 1,012,000, or 13.5 per cent — the highest level in about 12 years.

Of the 981,000 young people classified as NEET in the spring, about 393,000 were unemployed and looking for work, while 588,000 — around six in ten — were economically inactive, meaning they were neither working nor actively seeking a job. The Milburn Review, the independent review of young people and work led by former health secretary Alan Milburn, has warned that as many as one in six young people could be NEET within five years if current trends continue, and it puts the cumulative annual cost of youth disengagement at around £125 billion — more than the UK spends on education.

The review’s interim report, published in May 2026, found that the crisis is increasingly a health crisis as much as a jobs crisis. In 2025, 44 per cent of NEET young people said a health condition limited their ability to work, up from 26 per cent in 2015, and the number of young people economically inactive because of long-term sickness has doubled since 2021. The review also found that the longer a young person stays out, the harder it becomes to return: 65 per cent of those NEET for less than a year were back in education or work the following year, compared with only 25 per cent of those out for more than a year. A 24-year-old who is currently NEET faces a 45 per cent probability of never having held a formal job.

Mr Burnham has called the situation “an economic catastrophe and moral failure”, and Mr Milburn warned in an article for The Mirror on 31 October that failing to act “will cost lives” and see “another generation failed”. Writing ahead of his final report, Mr Milburn noted that Britain’s NEET rate of 13 per cent compares with 4 per cent in the Netherlands, with only Romania worse in Europe, and that six in ten NEET young people have never had a job.

The government’s announcement on Thursday was paired with a concrete step on work experience. Siemens Mobility, the rail engineering company, will create more than 3,300 work-experience opportunities a year, reaching 10,000 young people over three years, as part of the government’s ambition to deliver 200,000 additional placements for 14 to 16-year-olds. The programme combines digital learning with hands-on experience, and the Prime Minister joined children for a national science lesson to mark the launch.

Aglaja Schneider, managing director of Siemens Mobility UK and Ireland, said the company hoped the lesson would inspire more girls to see engineering as a possibility. University College London research cited by the government shows that engineering aspirations diverge by the age of 10, with just 11 per cent of girls aspiring to engineering careers compared with 44 per cent of boys. Rob Morris, also a managing director at Siemens Mobility, pointed to the scale of the workforce challenge: up to 70,000 workers could leave Britain’s rail industry by 2030, making investment in future talent “more important” than ever. The company’s £360 million investment in the UK includes its Rail Technology Centre in Wiltshire and the Goole Rail Village in Yorkshire.

Nishi Mayor, director of employer engagement and partnerships at the Youth Futures Foundation, welcomed the salary measure, saying that “too many young people struggle to access opportunities when they are looking for jobs”. “Providing clear information about pay can help young people make informed decisions about employment opportunities, which for employers could mean more applications from more suitable candidates, ensuring they have the talent pipeline they need,” she said.

Why pay secrecy hurts women most

The government and campaigners frame the law as an equality measure as much as a youth employment measure. Hiding pay details “disadvantages women by forcing them to negotiate blind, leaving them more vulnerable to lower pay offers”, according to the GOV.UK announcement, and ministers say publishing salaries upfront “can help expose unjustified differences in pay, give workers greater confidence to challenge discrimination and prevent disagreements over pay escalating into disputes”.

Penny East, chief executive of the Fawcett Society, which has long campaigned for greater pay transparency, said: “For too long, salary secrecy has put women at a disadvantage, leaving them negotiating in the dark and making it much harder to challenge unfair and unequal pay. Requiring employers to publish salaries in job adverts is a significant step towards making work fairer for women and tackling the gender pay gap.” She added that “women will no longer have to make decisions about their financial futures based on vague promises or unclear terms”.

The Trades Union Congress also welcomed the move. Its general secretary, Paul Nowak, pointed out that secrecy around salary can lead to lower salary offers for women, minority ethnic and disabled workers, according to BritBrief’s report of the announcement.

The debate does not stop at the advert. Britain’s equality watchdog, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, has urged ministers to go further and ban employers from asking job applicants how much they earned in previous jobs, arguing that questions about previous salaries allow existing inequalities to follow workers from one job to the next. Research by the Fawcett Society, cited by the commission, found that 58 per cent of women and 54 per cent of men felt that questions about previous earnings had resulted in them being offered a lower wage. The commission also called for employers to be legally obliged to answer a proposed statutory pay questionnaire, so workers could obtain information about possible discrimination before taking legal action.

The government’s consultation, which closed on 27 October, also covered a wider reform of equal pay law, including a proposed enforcement body — the Equal Pay Regulatory and Enforcement Unit — and protections for outsourced workers. The commission said it was best placed to host the proposed unit, but warned it would need additional funding to be effective. Whether the salary-history ban and the enforcement unit make it into the final legislation will be one of the key tests of how far ministers are willing to go.

Britain joins a global shift towards pay transparency

Britain is not moving in isolation. According to Reuters, New York became the largest US city to require most private employers to disclose salary ranges in 2022, and 14 US states plus Washington DC now require a pay range in job postings. The European Union adopted its Pay Transparency Directive in 2023, giving member states until June 2026 to write its rules into national law. The directive gives applicants the right to receive information about initial pay or its range, and bans employers from asking about pay history.

The British proposal is narrower than the EU directive in some respects: it does not, as drafted in the consultation, include a ban on asking candidates about their current or previous pay, nor a right to request pay information about comparable colleagues, nor a duty to make pay-setting criteria accessible. That gap is precisely what the Equality and Human Rights Commission is pressing ministers to close, and it is likely to be a central argument in Parliament when the legislation is debated.

The direction of travel is nevertheless clear, and it reflects a broader change in how labour markets work. A decade ago, withholding the salary was standard practice, defended as commercially sensitive. Today, most large employers already publish ranges voluntarily, and recruitment platforms report that adverts without pay attract far fewer and less suitable applicants. The government’s own figures make the point: the employers who already disclose pay are, in the government’s words, “doing the right thing”, and the law is designed to make their practice the minimum standard for everyone else.

The announcement also sits within a wider cost-of-living package set out by Chancellor John Healey around his first Budget last week, which included an overhaul of carer’s allowance and higher tax-free mileage rates for workers who use their own cars. Mr Burnham said: “We are taking on the big challenges facing the country. But that doesn’t mean losing sight of the everyday problems that cost people money or simply aren’t fair.”

Analysis: Why It Matters

A small change with an outsized effect on first jobs

For all its modest scale, the “say what you pay” law targets one of the most quietly corrosive features of the modern jobs market: the information gap between employer and applicant. A young person applying for a first job has no salary history to anchor a negotiation, no network to whisper what a role “really” pays, and no leverage to walk away after three rounds of interviews. When the pay is hidden, the employer holds all the cards — and the applicant pays for the uncertainty with wasted time, rejected offers and, too often, a first salary set far below what the job is worth. That first salary matters more than almost any other number in a working life, because every subsequent raise, promotion and job move tends to be calculated as a percentage of it. A low start compounds for decades. Making the salary visible before the application is therefore not a cosmetic courtesy; it is a correction to a market failure that falls hardest on the people with the least power in it.

The NEET crisis is the real story behind the headline

It would be a mistake to read this announcement as a standalone employment reform. It is, in substance, the first concrete policy to emerge from the government’s confrontation with the NEET crisis, and the numbers explain the urgency. Nearly a million young people outside work, education or training; six in ten of them not even looking; a £125 billion annual cost; a generation in which health conditions, above all mental ill-health, have become the single biggest barrier to work. The salary disclosure law will not, on its own, bring a single one of those young people back into work. What it does is remove one of the smaller but real frictions that stops them trying: the fear of applying blind for jobs they cannot afford to take. Its significance lies less in what it does directly than in what it signals — that the government now treats youth inactivity as a structural emergency requiring action on many fronts at once, from work experience to the Milburn Review’s final recommendations, rather than as a cyclical problem that will fix itself when the economy improves.

Pay transparency is the cheapest equality policy available

Governments searching for ways to narrow the gender pay gap usually reach for expensive or contentious tools: quotas, reporting duties, litigation. Pay transparency in job adverts is none of those things. It costs employers almost nothing, requires no new bureaucracy to operate, and works through the most basic market mechanism there is — information. When every advert carries a salary, women can compare offers, spot underpayment and walk away from roles that undervalue them, without needing to bring a claim or prove discrimination. The evidence from the United States, where salary-range laws have spread rapidly since 2022, points in the same direction: transparency compresses the range of offers and reduces the penalty paid by people who negotiate less aggressively. That is why the Fawcett Society and the TUC welcomed the announcement so warmly, and why the real argument now is not whether to require disclosure but how far to go — whether to ban salary-history questions, as the equality watchdog urges, and whether to give workers a real right to challenge unequal pay once the numbers are visible.

The test will be enforcement, not announcement

The announcement is strong on principle and thin on the details that determine whether a law works. There is no date for the legislation, no definition yet of what counts as a salary — a range, a specific figure, or a benchmark rate — no word on which employers are covered, and no enforcement mechanism. Those are not minor omissions. A requirement to publish “a range” can be satisfied with a band so wide as to be meaningless; a law with no penalty for non-compliance will be ignored by exactly the employers whose behaviour most needs changing; and small businesses, which employ a large share of young workers, will reasonably ask what support they get to comply. The government has promised that further details on scope, required information, implementation and enforcement will be set out in due course, and the consultation’s proposal of an extended implementation period suggests the timetable will be measured in years rather than months. The Prime Minister’s call for employers to act voluntarily now is an honest acknowledgement of that reality — and a test of whether the voluntary approach, which has left 59 per cent of employers still hiding ranges, can deliver what the law eventually will.

A government trying to prove it can do the small things

There is a political dimension to this announcement that should not be ignored. Mr Burnham’s government came to office promising to take on “the big challenges”, but its early months have been dominated by vast, slow-moving problems: an economy squeezed by the US-Iran conflict, inflation heading towards 5 per cent, a Bank of England that raised interest rates for the first time in three years on Thursday, and a public sector under strain. Against that backdrop, a law requiring salaries in job adverts is deliberately, almost defiantly, small — a fix to an everyday frustration that almost everyone has experienced and almost no one defends. That is its political logic. It is a policy voters can understand in a sentence, feel in their own lives, and judge quickly. The same instinct was visible in the Prime Minister’s remarks on special educational needs reform on Thursday, when he said it would not be “right to rush” changes to a system he called broken — a government trying to show it can distinguish between reforms that need care and problems that can simply be fixed. If the salary law reaches the statute book in a robust form, it will be a rare example of a government delivering a visible, popular change quickly; if it stalls in consultation, it will be remembered as a press release rather than a reform.

What to Watch Next

1. The legislation itself. The government says it will bring forward a Bill “as soon as possible”, but has given no date and no detail on scope, the form of disclosure or enforcement. Watch for the Bill’s publication, and for whether it requires a specific salary, a range, or merely a benchmark rate — and whether small employers are exempt.
2. The Milburn Review’s final report. The final report on youth inactivity is due in the coming weeks, with the government promising to respond before the end of 2026 and a White Paper expected early in 2027. Its recommendations on health, benefits and the Youth Guarantee will shape the much bigger response to the NEET crisis of which the salary law is only the first step.
3. The salary-history question. The Equality and Human Rights Commission wants a ban on asking applicants about previous pay, and the government’s consultation covered the issue. Whether that ban makes it into the Bill will show how far ministers are prepared to go beyond the advert itself.
4. Whether employers move voluntarily. The Prime Minister has asked businesses to publish salaries now rather than wait for the law. Recruitment data over the coming months will show whether the announcement alone shifts behaviour — or whether, as the CIPD figures suggest, only a legal duty will move the majority.
5. The youth jobs numbers. The next official NEET figures are due on 26 November 2026. Any movement in the headline rate, and in the share of young people who are economically inactive rather than unemployed, will be the first indication of whether the government’s wider youth employment drive is beginning to bite.

Sources

• GOV.UK — New ‘say what you pay’ law to help young people into work (official announcement, 5 November 2026)
• Reuters — Britain to make salary disclosure in job ads mandatory (5 November 2026)
• BritBrief — UK law to force salary details in all job adverts (5 November 2026)
• Office for National Statistics — Young people not in education, employment or training (NEET), UK
• Department for Work and Pensions — Young People and Work: Interim Report (Milburn Review, May 2026)
• The Times — Ban bosses from asking for salary history, equality watchdog urges