Salary bands may soon be wide enough to hide in

Mandatory pay transparency would remove an employer's oldest negotiating advantage, which is knowing the number while the candidate does not. The response now being sketched in compensation teams would not challenge the rule at all. It would comply with it, at a width of 176,000 euros.

The draft advertisement in question would be for a mid-level analyst. The band would begin below the market rate for the job and end somewhere near the head of department, justified throughout by the phrase depending on experience — three words asked to carry more weight than any three words in employment law have carried before. Nothing in it would be untrue. Somebody at that company could earn 214,000 euros. That person would not be the analyst and would not have applied for the analyst role, but the advertisement would describe a real interval between two real salaries, which on most readings of most transparency rules is what a range is.

A product category would follow within months. Vendors would offer band optimisation: feed in the job family, the market data and the exact wording of the applicable rule, and receive the widest interval a regulator would struggle to call bad faith. Demonstrations would show the band narrowing in red as the compliance risk score rises, and widening in green as it falls.

“We would publish a range because the law asks for a range,” a compensation lead would say. “The law does not ask for a useful range. We would be delighted to provide one the moment it does. Until then we would be providing the other kind, accurately.”

The internal effect would arrive before the external one. Published bands are read first by the people already employed, who would discover in a single afternoon where they sit inside an interval their own employer designed to be unreadable. Compensation teams would brace for this and prepare a document about total reward, which is what an organisation produces when the number is bad and the number has just become public.

Candidates would adapt faster than the regulator. Within a year the published band would be treated as decoration, and the real figure would circulate where it circulates now: in group chats, in spreadsheets passed between strangers, and in the first thirty seconds of a call with a recruiter who does not want to waste an afternoon. A rule written to close the shadow market would have moved it one step sideways.

The second rule would then arrive, as second rules do, specifying a maximum width — a ratio, probably, or a percentage of the midpoint. Exemptions would be argued for commission-heavy sales roles and for postings that genuinely span two levels. Inside those exemptions the industry would build its next hiding place, and the advertisement would say depending on experience again, in the same three words, entirely legally.