You find a role worth applying for, scroll to the part where the salary should be, and read "competitive package", or "depending on experience", or nothing at all. That silence is not an oversight or a technical limitation. Someone decided the number was better kept until later, and until recently there was very little you could do about it.
That was supposed to change on 7 June 2026, the date by which every EU member state had to have a pay transparency law of its own in force. The right behind that deadline is narrower than the headlines suggested, and whether it has reached you depends on which country's law governs the job. It is still worth reading properly, because the way it is written changes what you should say.
What the directive gives you
Directive (EU) 2023/970, adopted on 10 May 2023, is mostly about employers: reporting gender pay gaps, justifying pay differences, letting staff compare. Article 5 is the part addressed to people who do not work there yet.1
"Applicants for employment shall have the right to receive, from the prospective employer, information about: (a) the initial pay or its range, based on objective, gender-neutral criteria, to be attributed for the position concerned; and (b) where applicable, the relevant provisions of the collective agreement applied by the employer in relation to the position."
Read the next sentence carefully, because it is where most summaries of this law go wrong. The information "shall be provided in a manner such as to ensure an informed and transparent negotiation on pay, such as in a published job vacancy notice, prior to the job interview or otherwise."1
A right to receive is not a duty to advertise. The sentence names a published vacancy notice and the moment before the interview, then adds "or otherwise": these are examples of how the information might reach you, not a schedule it has to arrive by. What binds is the standard they illustrate, which is that the information has to come in a form that lets you negotiate on informed terms.
Two things follow. An employer can leave the advert as vague as it has always been and still satisfy that, so if you were expecting adverts across Europe to carry salary bands from June, the text does not require it. And if you were expecting a hard right to the number before the interview, the text offers that as an example rather than a deadline. What you have is a right to be told in time to negotiate properly, which is weaker and vaguer than the headlines, and still a great deal more than nothing.
There is a second provision in the same article that is easier to use and gets far less attention. Article 5(2): "An employer shall not ask applicants about their pay history during their current or previous employment relationships."1 That is the "so, what are you on at the moment?" question, the one that quietly anchors your next salary to your last one. Where the article is in force, it is not a question you have to handle gracefully. It is one nobody is allowed to ask.
Whether it has reached you is a national question, not a European one
A directive is not law you can point at. It is an instruction to twenty-seven governments to write their own law, and Article 34 gave them until 7 June 2026 to do it.1
On 10 August 2026, two months after that deadline, the EUR-Lex register of national transposition measures recorded notified measures from twelve of the twenty-seven member states.2
This is the honest position, and it is more useful than a confident one. If you are job hunting in the EU right now, the correct question is not "what does the directive say" but "what did my country enact, and when does it apply". Those are different questions with different answers in twenty-seven places.
One caution on "my country". Each national statute sets its own reach, and it generally follows the job rather than the applicant: where the work is done, who employs you, which law governs the contract. For an ordinary local application those are the same place. For a cross-border or remote one they are not, and it is the role's law that decides, not your address.
Why quoting Brussels at a private employer does not work
Suppose your country has missed the deadline. You have read Article 5, the employer will not name a number, and it is tempting to cite the directive in your next email.
It will not help, and the reason is settled law. In Faccini Dori, decided on 14 July 1994, the Court of Justice held that "a directive cannot of itself impose obligations on an individual and cannot therefore be relied upon as such against an individual".3 The case concerned a consumer trying to use an untransposed directive against a company, and the Court's answer was that she could not: in the absence of national implementing measures, the right could not be derived from the directive itself or enforced in a national court against the trader.3
An employer that has not been given the obligation by its own parliament does not have it. The position differs where the employer is the state or an arm of it, which is why applicants to public bodies may be on firmer ground than applicants to private companies in the same country. That is a distinction worth taking legal advice on if it matters to you; it is not one to test in a recruitment email.
None of which makes a late directive irrelevant. The same judgment says that a national court applying national law "must do so, as far as possible, in the light of the wording and the purpose of the directive so as to achieve the result it has in view", and that a member state which fails to transpose on time can be made to compensate the people the directive was meant to protect.3 So the directive still reaches into how existing national rules are read, and it is worth checking whether your country had pay rules of its own before any of this. Those are arguments for a lawyer, though. They are not arguments for an email to a recruiter.
The practical conclusion is not that the law is useless. It is that until the country whose law governs the role has enacted it, your leverage in the room is social rather than legal, which is what it always was.
New York attaches the duty to the advert instead
It is worth seeing the alternative design, because it explains why job seekers in some places see numbers and others do not.
New York State's Labor Law section 194-b applies to any entity employing four or more people, and to anyone "acting as an employment agent or recruiter". It does not reach every advert they place. The job has to be one "that will physically be performed, at least in part, in the state of New York", which the statute extends to a job performed outside the state that "reports to a supervisor, office, or other work site in New York". And the definition of employer excludes "a temporary help firm", so the agency adverts that fill a pool of temporary assignments are outside it. Where it does apply, they must disclose, in the advertisement, "the compensation or a range of compensation for such job, promotion, or transfer opportunity", together with "the job description for such job, promotion, or transfer opportunity, if such description exists". The statute defines the range as "the minimum and maximum annual salary or hourly range of compensation ... that the employer in good faith believes to be accurate", and it closes the obvious loophole: "No employer shall refuse to interview, hire, promote, employ or otherwise retaliate against an applicant or current employee for exercising any rights under this section."4
The difference is structural. The European right attaches to you and can be satisfied privately, at whatever point still leaves the negotiation an informed one. The New York duty attaches to the advertisement, applies to the agency as well as the employer, and is visible to everyone before anyone applies. One tells you what you may receive; the other changes what is on the page.
These rules are made state by state in the United States rather than nationally, so what you see depends on where the job is, and on whether an employer hiring remotely has decided to comply everywhere.
So ask, and make it easy to answer
None of this removes the moment where you have to raise it yourself. A few things make that go better.
Ask at the scheduling email, not at the offer. The natural moment is when someone proposes a time: "Before we book a slot, could you tell me the budgeted range for the role? I would rather find out now if we are in different territory." Nobody has invested anything yet, which is what makes it a cheap question to answer.
Ask for the budgeted range, not what you could get. The budget is a fact that already exists in a document somewhere. What you could get is a negotiation, and starting it before you have been interviewed is a weaker position than waiting.
Do not answer the pay-history question with a number. Give the range you are looking for instead. In countries where Article 5(2) is in force the question should not arrive at all. Where it does arrive lawfully, declining still has a small cost: a few recruiters read any deflection as difficult. It is usually a price worth paying, and you can lower it by sounding relaxed rather than principled.
Put it in writing. Not for legal reasons, but because a number in an email is one that has been checked. A number in a phone call is one someone remembers approximately.
The cost of asking is real but small. Some employers will think less of you for it. Others answer without blinking, and an answer that arrives early can save you three rounds of interviews for a job that was never going to pay enough.
If the reason you are opening forty adverts is that you cannot tell from the outside which six are worth asking about, that is a sorting problem rather than a negotiation problem. JobCraftly can do the searching and the reading, and show you the roles that genuinely match what you asked for, with a note on why each one fits.
What a range tells you, and what it does not
A published range is a budget, not an offer. It usually spans a level rather than a person, which is why the top of it belongs to someone with more scope than the advert describes. Assume you are being assessed against the middle unless somebody tells you otherwise.
It also says nothing about the parts of the package that vary most between employers: pension contribution, bonus scheme and whether it has ever paid out, holiday, notice, the cost of the commute the role assumes. A generous number attached to a thin package is a common shape and the range will not show it to you.
Which is the small, unheroic version of what the directive is trying to do. Not to hand you a fair salary, but to stop you spending a month of evenings on a process whose answer was always going to be no.
