A Push for Transparency

Seventy-five percent of employers think job candidates expect pay transparency, according to Mercer's 2024 Global Pay Transparency Survey Report. The same amount, per a 2024 Aon plc survey, aren't ready for pay transparency laws, despite multiple states—including New York, California, and Colorado—passing recent legislation that requires employers to disclose salary ranges. Only 19 percent of US companies have a wage transparency strategy in place.

Appropriate salaries are "the second-most important reason employees choose to stay with an organization," says Gordon Frost, global rewards solution leader at Mercer, in a press release. "Don't wait to prioritize these efforts—because there is still a lot of work to be done." The financial services company surveyed more than 1,100 people from more than 50 countries representing more than 1,100 companies for the report.

Candidates' push for pay transparency, bolstered by the prevalence of websites such as Glassdoor, LinkedIn, Indeed, and PayScale, is reshaping the corporate workforce. By the end of 2025, 14 US states and four Canadian provinces will have wage transparency laws. Every European Union country will implement such policies by the end of 2026.

In answer to whether they intend to increase the level of pay information they currently share, companies in the 2024 Global Pay Transparency Survey Report had mixed responses. The US, the UK, and the Netherlands had the highest number of businesses that said they would share more information. Those who would share only where required by legislation include Denmark, Germany, and Poland. Organizations that said they had no intention of increasing pay information had the highest representation in Singapore and Canada, with Poland and the US tied.

The most optimistic companies about the potential for pay transparency to improve equity reside in Europe. Asia, however, was split on that issue, with 75 percent of respondents evenly distributed among development stages: currently developing strategies, planning to start in the next 12 months, and no future plans. Only 4 percent of companies worldwide strongly agreed that they are fully prepared for the effects of wage transparency requirements.

The biggest hurdle businesses face, according to the 2024 Global Pay Transparency Survey Report, is managers' inability to explain compensation programs to employees.

"With manager enablement [being] one of the biggest challenges our clients face in 2025, these employees will be critical to your pay transparency strategy's success," says Tauseef Rahman, a partner in Mercer's career practice, in a press release. "Ensuring managers are equipped to deliver these messages to your workforce should be a key component of that rollout."