Why "competitive salary" won't survive pay transparency

“Competitive salary” will not survive the EU pay transparency directive because Directive (EU) 2023/970, Article 5(1)(a), gives applicants a right to the initial pay or its pay range based on objective, gender-neutral criteria, and a phrase that discloses no figure does not satisfy that right. With national rules due from 7 June 2026, vague pay copy is about to read as non-compliance to regulators and as evasion to candidates.

This article is practitioner guidance, not legal advice. National implementations differ; confirm specifics for your market with counsel.

Why doesn’t “competitive salary” meet the directive?

It does not meet the directive because it discloses nothing. Article 5(1)(a) of Directive (EU) 2023/970 entitles an applicant to receive the initial pay or its range, and that information must rest on objective, gender-neutral criteria. “Competitive salary,” “salary DOE” (depending on experience), “market rate,” and “attractive package” all convey a vibe, not a number, so none of them gives the applicant the figure the right is built around.

The directive is gender-pay legislation, not a marketing rule. Its purpose is to stop historical pay gaps from being carried forward, which is why the obligation is framed as a candidate right rather than an advertising guideline. Once your member state has transposed the directive, an applicant can ask for the range and you must provide it on objective criteria. If your ad already published “competitive salary,” you have signalled that you either do not have a criteria-based range or do not want to share it. Neither is a good look. For the country-by-country picture of when this bites, see do job ads need a salary by country in 2026.

What counts as a “genuine range built on objective criteria”?

A genuine range is one whose width you can explain by reference to the criteria you use to set pay, not one you picked to keep your options open. Article 5(1)(a) ties the figure to objective, gender-neutral criteria, and the directive’s recitals point to factors such as skills, effort, responsibility, and working conditions. In practice that means your range should map to a real pay band: where a new hire lands inside it should depend on assessable things like years of relevant experience or scope of responsibility, not on what they earned before or how hard they negotiate.

Use this test before you publish a range:

1. Can you name the criteria that move a candidate from the bottom to the top of the band (for example, experience level, team-lead responsibility, language requirements)?
2. Would two equally qualified candidates of different genders land in the same place in the band?
3. Is the spread explained by those criteria, or only by your wish to stay flexible?
4. Could you defend the floor and the ceiling to a works council or an equality body using documents you already hold?
5. Does the band match what you actually pay current staff in the same role?

If you cannot answer the first four cleanly, you do not have a range yet, you have a guess. The pay transparency job ad checklist walks through building one band per role from your existing pay data.

Why are wide ranges like EUR 30,000 to EUR 95,000 a problem?

An enormous band is the new “competitive salary”: technically a range, practically meaningless. The directive does not set a hard cap on width, but Article 5(1)(a) requires the figure to be based on objective criteria, and a band of EUR 30,000 to EUR 95,000 cannot usually be explained by criteria alone. A spread that wide almost always means you have fused two or three different roles, or that you are reserving the right to anchor low and call it generous later. A regulator reading it sees evasion. A candidate reading it sees a question mark.

Wide ranges also fail the people you most want. Senior candidates assume the floor is aimed at them and self-select out. Junior candidates assume the ceiling is unreachable. The band that was meant to attract everyone repels the well-matched and attracts the mismatched, which is the opposite of efficient sourcing. The fix is not a single number, which would be inflexible, but a range tight enough that its width is obviously a function of seniority or scope, for example EUR 52,000 to EUR 62,000 for one defined level rather than one band stretched across a whole job family.

How does the salary-history ban change the negotiation?

It removes your oldest anchor. Article 5(2) of Directive (EU) 2023/970 prohibits employers from asking applicants about their pay history during their current or previous employment relationships. The old playbook, where you asked “what are you on now?” and pegged the offer just above it, is gone. You can no longer let a candidate’s last paycheck set the price, and you certainly cannot use a vague ad to keep the number hidden until you have extracted that anchor.

Old recruiting move	What the directive does to it
“Competitive salary” in the ad, number revealed later	Fails the Article 5(1)(a) right to the initial pay or range on objective criteria
“What’s your current salary?”	Prohibited by the Article 5(2) salary-history ban
One huge band to stay flexible	Hard to defend as a criteria-based range under Article 5(1)(a)
Offer pegged just above last pay	No legal anchor left; your published range sets the frame

The combined effect is structural. With no salary-history question and a published range, the negotiation now runs against your own objective criteria. That is healthier for fairness, and it is also cleaner for you, because the band you can defend is the band you advertised. Note the ban applies even where your ad is silent, so a recruiter who stops publishing pay does not escape it. For more on framing language, see the EU pay transparency directive for job ads.

Where do things stand in 2026, and who is affected?

The transposition deadline is 7 June 2026, but most member states missed it. Article 34 of Directive (EU) 2023/970 required national laws to be in force by that date, yet as of mid-June 2026 only a handful of jurisdictions had enacted the pay-transparency-prior-to-employment rules, with large economies including Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Sweden still in draft. The Netherlands, for example, has signalled application from 1 January 2027. So the rule you must follow depends entirely on where the role sits.

Two practical points follow. First, a missed deadline does not make the directive optional: applicants can rely on directly effective rights against the state once the deadline passes, national courts read existing law in light of the directive, and several governments are racing to enact. Treat 7 June 2026 as the floor, not a reprieve. Second, the obligation attaches to the role’s location, not your head office, so a recruiter or agency filling roles across the EU will hit different live dates in different markets. Agencies should read pay transparency for recruitment agencies, which covers who carries the disclosure duty when a client controls the band.

Do real salary ranges actually win you candidates?

Yes, and this is the part finance teams underrate. Major job boards now let candidates filter and sort vacancies by salary, and listings without a figure, or with a meaningless range, are excluded or buried in those results. An ad that says “competitive salary” is invisible to anyone who set a minimum-pay filter, which is most serious candidates. A genuine, well-built range wins salary-filtered searches, the highest-intent traffic on the board.

The downstream economics improve too:

1. Better-matched applicants apply, because the band tells them whether the role fits before they spend time.
2. Fewer candidates drop out late, because pay is no longer a surprise at the offer stage.
3. Time-to-fill drops, because you are not re-running searches after a salary mismatch kills a final-round candidate.
4. Your employer brand benefits, because transparency reads as confidence rather than something to hide.

So the compliance change and the conversion change point the same way. The teams that move first, replacing “competitive salary” with a defensible band before their national rule lands, get the recruiting upside early instead of scrambling at the deadline.

How Recruitifly helps

Recruitifly’s posting compliance checks flag vague pay phrasing like “competitive salary” or “salary DOE” before a vacancy goes live, and prompt for an initial pay or range tied to objective, gender-neutral criteria in line with Article 5 of Directive (EU) 2023/970. The Fly assistant can suggest a tighter, criteria-based band from your existing pay data and explain its width, while role-level controls keep the salary-history question out of your screening flow. For recruitment agencies filling roles across multiple markets, the Agency Hub keeps each client’s bands and disclosure duties scoped to the right organisation and the right national rule.

Recruitifly is in private beta. If you want to retire “competitive salary” without guessing at the rules, talk to us and join the beta.