The salary secrecy ranking: which professions will not tell you what they pay

Seventy percent of the 74,470 postings in our corpus state a salary. The other thirty percent are not distributed randomly, and the shape of who hides pay turned out to be the most interesting ranking we have produced this year.

The pattern is negotiation, not money

A first guess would be that high salaries hide and low salaries show. The table does not support it. Security engineers earn well and hide pay; medical writers earn well and publish it. What the secretive column shares is something else. In every one of those fields, negotiating is part of the work itself. Sales roles negotiate for a living. Consultants price engagements. The employers hiring them treat the salary conversation as the first test of the skill they are buying.

The transparent column mirrors it. Civil service scales, union agreements, licensure bands, grant-funded positions: places where pay is set by a schedule rather than a conversation. A police department cannot improvise your number, so it prints it.

Even the boards disagree

Profession is not the only axis. The infrastructure itself has a transparency gradient, and it is steep. Across our thirteen sources, federal postings on USAJOBS state pay 100 percent of the time, because the law requires it. The UK board Reed runs at 83 percent. General aggregators sit near 71 percent. Then come the applicant-tracking systems the startup world runs on: Greenhouse at 55 percent, Ashby at 50, and Lever at 7 percent.

Seven percent. The companies most likely to describe themselves as transparent, mission-driven, and disruptive publish salary at one-fourteenth the rate of the federal government. Some of this is the ATS defaults, since Lever's posting templates never pushed a salary field the way compliance-driven boards do. Most of it is choice. A venture-backed startup pricing equity-heavy offers wants maximum room to vary the package per candidate, and an empty salary line is how that room is kept.

What opacity costs the candidate

A posting without a number moves the first offer to the end of the process, after you have spent interview hours and started wanting the job. Research on anchoring says whoever names the first figure shapes the range, and a company that has seen ten thousand offers knows the market better than someone who changes jobs every three years. Opacity is not an oversight. It is a position.

Transparency laws in Colorado, California, New York, and Washington have pushed the published share up in those states, which our corpus reflects unevenly across sources. The professional pattern survives the legal one, though. Even where the law requires a band, sales postings publish wider bands than nursing postings do.

Playing a hidden-number game well

Since a third of postings will stay blank whatever the laws do, the workable response is preparation rather than complaint. Three habits cover most of it. Look the band up before the first conversation, from blended sources rather than a single self-reported site, so the recruiter's screening question meets a researched range instead of a guess. Ask for the range early and in writing, because in the transparency-law states the company must produce one, and everywhere else the speed and width of the answer is itself information. And treat a refusal to give any number after a full interview loop as data about how the company negotiates everything else, since with you they were still on best behavior.

Where this leaves you

If you work in a secretive field, assume the missing number is a strategy and prepare accordingly. Look up the band before the first call. Our salary pages carry blended figures for 152 occupations, built from the postings that do state pay plus official statistics, precisely so that a blank posting does not leave you blank too. And if you are choosing between fields, the transparency column is worth a glance for its own sake. It tells you in advance how much of your career will be spent haggling.