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Gillian Graham
Gillian Graham has invested 17 years in Allstaff, rising to the position of Director, where she oversees the Office and Professional Services, Engineering, and Manufacturing Permanent Divisions.
Salary transparency has moved from niche practice to genuine expectation, but the decision to publish pay ranges in job listings still carries real trade-offs employers need to weigh honestly. We help employers across the Central Belt navigate exactly this: the case for it is strong, but so are some of the practical complications, and getting the balance right matters more than following the trend blindly. This guide sets out both sides plainly, where UK compliance genuinely stands, and how to implement salary ranges well if you decide to.
The strongest argument, in our experience, is a practical one: publishing a range filters out mismatched candidates before they ever apply, saving both sides time. When expectations are set upfront, candidates who wouldn’t accept the role at that pay level self-select out early, and those who do apply tend to be genuinely aligned – which shortens time-to-hire and improves the overall quality of your applicant pool.
There’s a trust dimension too. Salary transparency signals openness in a way candidates increasingly notice and value, and it can meaningfully differentiate an employer in a competitive market – particularly where rivals are still being vague. That perception of fairness doesn’t stop at the point of hire either: honest expectations set during recruitment tend to reduce post-hire dissatisfaction, and current employees who see transparent, consistent pay practices are generally less prone to the resentment that builds when colleagues compare notes and find unexplained gaps.
Pay equity is the third, and arguably most substantive, argument we see raised with employers. Published pay bands reduce room for the kind of individually negotiated, discretionary pay decisions that tend to disadvantage candidates who negotiate less assertively – a pattern that disproportionately affects women.
The UK’s gender pay gap remains real and worth taking seriously: ONS data puts the median hourly gender pay gap for full-time employees at 6.9% as of April 2025, rising to 12.8% when part-time work is included. Transparent pay ranges won’t close that gap on their own, but they remove one of the mechanisms – opaque, individually negotiated offers – that tends to widen it.
The case against is less often discussed, but we think it’s genuinely substantive, not just resistance to change.
The most immediate concern we hear from employers is competitive exposure. Publishing pay ranges reveals compensation strategy to direct competitors, who can use that information to target your talent or position their own offers just above yours. It can also expose gaps between what you’re paying and prevailing market rates – uncomfortable if your ranges are behind the curve, and a particular risk for smaller organisations that may already be working with tighter budgets than larger competitors.
Negotiation dynamics shift too, and not always in the employer’s favour. Published ranges tend to anchor candidate expectations to the top of the band regardless of actual experience, and candidates may disengage entirely if the range doesn’t meet their expectations – sometimes before you’d have had the chance to sell them on the wider role or opportunity. Managing disappointment when a final offer lands below the top of an advertised range is a real, recurring friction point we see employers navigate.
Internal pay equity brings its own tension. Publishing a range for a new role can expose disparities with existing employees doing comparable work, and it’s not unusual for that to trigger requests for pay reviews from current staff who feel, sometimes fairly, that they’ve been overtaken by a new hire’s advertised range. That’s an administrative and financial burden worth planning for rather than being caught out by.
Finally, we’d flag a genuine operational challenge in simply getting the ranges right. Setting accurate, competitive bands requires current market data, and publishing outdated or unrealistic ranges can damage credibility just as much as publishing none at all. This gets harder across multiple locations, levels, or industries with genuinely variable compensation structures, and keeping ranges current is an ongoing resource commitment, not a one-off task.
UK employers are not currently legally required to publish salary ranges in job listings. That’s different from some other jurisdictions – several US states now mandate it, and the EU’s Pay Transparency Directive requires member states to implement similar rules by June 2026 — but the UK isn’t bound by EU directives post-Brexit, and no equivalent domestic law is currently in force.
That doesn’t mean the picture is static. UK employers with 250 or more staff have been required to publish annual gender pay gap data since 2017, and there’s been continued policy discussion – including a government call for evidence on equality law – about whether measures like salary ranges in job adverts or restrictions on asking about salary history should be introduced more broadly. We’d treat this as a genuine trend worth watching rather than an imminent legal requirement, and would encourage any employer weighing this decision to keep half an eye on how the policy conversation develops, particularly if you operate across both UK and EU markets.
If you do move to salary ranges, the quality of implementation matters as much as the decision itself – and we see real room for improvement across UK employers generally. Analysis of UK job postings by compensation platform HR DataHub found that around 24% still don’t include a salary range at all, and the gap widens sharply by seniority: only 39% of employers publish ranges for director-level roles, compared with 67% for frontline positions. That inconsistency is itself worth noting – it suggests many employers are treating this as optional at exactly the levels where transparency arguably matters most.
Our advice is to start by defining genuinely meaningful bands, aligned to your internal compensation structure and benchmarked against current market rates, rather than a wide range designed to avoid commitment – overly broad ranges tend to create scepticism rather than clarity. Be clear, even briefly, about what determines where a candidate lands within the range: experience, specific skills, scope of the role. This does far more to manage expectations than the range alone.
We’d also recommend reviewing and updating bands regularly rather than setting them once and letting them drift – an outdated range is arguably worse for credibility than no range at all. And think about this as part of a broader compensation philosophy rather than a job-ad-level decision made in isolation: how much detail you disclose, how it interacts with your employer brand, and how consistently it’s applied across roles and levels all send a signal, intentionally or not, about how seriously you take pay fairness as an organisation.
Whether or not to publish salary ranges isn’t a decision to make in isolation from your wider recruitment strategy. We work with employers across Glasgow, Paisley and the Central Belt to build compensation and job advertising approaches that are genuinely competitive and consistent. If you’d like to talk through your options, get in touch with our team — [LINK: contact/HR recruitment page].
Are UK employers legally required to publish salary ranges in job adverts? No, not currently. The UK doesn’t have a blanket legal requirement, unlike some US states and the incoming EU Pay Transparency Directive, which doesn’t bind the UK post-Brexit. Gender pay gap reporting is mandatory for employers with 250+ staff, but that’s a separate, narrower requirement.
Does publishing salary ranges actually help close the gender pay gap? It can help by reducing opaque, individually negotiated pay decisions, which tend to disadvantage candidates who negotiate less assertively. It’s not a complete solution on its own, but it removes one of the mechanisms that contributes to pay disparities.
What’s the biggest risk of publishing salary ranges? It varies by organisation, but competitive exposure and internal pay equity tension are the two most commonly cited concerns – competitors seeing your pay strategy, and existing employees discovering a new hire’s advertised range exceeds their own.
Should smaller employers be more cautious about salary transparency? Not necessarily cautious, but realistic. Smaller organisations with tighter budgets can be more exposed if their ranges reveal a gap with market rates, so getting the range genuinely accurate and competitive matters even more before publishing.
How wide should a published salary range be? Wide enough to reflect genuine differences in experience or scope, but not so wide it looks like you haven’t thought it through – very broad ranges tend to create scepticism rather than clarity. Pairing the range with a brief explanation of what determines placement within it helps manage this.