The State of European Tech Job Ads

01

Salary transparency: the law changed, job ads did not

The EU Pay Transparency Directive (2023/970) required member states to transpose its rules into national law by 7 June 2026. Among other things, it gives applicants the right to know the initial pay or pay range for a position, either in the ad itself or before the interview. As of publication, only four member states had met the deadline: Slovakia, Italy, Lithuania and Malta. Germany expects its revised Entgelttransparenzgesetz in early 2027. Job ads are only the visible end of that duty, since disclosure may also happen later in the hiring process. But ads are the part the market can see, and they have not moved.

The job ads reflect that limbo. Of 2,533 live tech job ads, only 170 (6.7%) state a salary or salary range. Counting each employer once instead of each ad, the picture barely improves: of 536 companies in the sample, only 60 state a salary anywhere, meaning 89% of employers do not disclose a single salary across all their openings. Germany is the starkest case: 3 of 861 ads (0.3%). Austria, which has required a minimum salary figure in job ads since 2011, shows what regulation does to disclosure. Restricted to ads located in EU member states, the rate drops to about 2% (25 of roughly 1,290); UK, Swiss and US-located ads pull the average up.

Salary disclosure rate by job location

• United States 55% (22 of 40)
• Austria 45.7% (16 of 35)
• Switzerland 15.4% (14 of 91)
• Remote (no fixed location) 10.4% (36 of 346)
• United Kingdom 9.7% (73 of 753)
• Netherlands 2.1% (4 of 190)
• Ireland 1.8% (2 of 109)
• Germany 0.3% (3 of 861)

The remaining 108 ads in other locations (Spain, France, Czechia, Serbia and a long tail) contain no stated salary; including them, the columns sum to 2,533 ads and 170 disclosures.

Even Austria is not at 100%: many Austrian ads reference the collective-agreement minimum without stating a number, which the stated-number rule does not count. Seniority, meanwhile, barely moves the needle. Lead roles disclose most often (10.5%), principal roles least (4.3%), and everything in between sits within a few points of the average. Employers are not withholding junior salaries more than senior ones; the silence is uniform across levels.

Who discloses, and who does not

Observed on the companies' own public career pages on 2026-07-02. This describes disclosure practice in our sample, not legal compliance: several of these employers are headquartered or hiring outside the EU, where the directive does not apply. Remote, the top discloser, sells remote employment infrastructure; CERN and the UK Atomic Energy Authority are public sector.

Where the transparency comes from

A same-day follow-up analysis classified every employer by headquarters (545 employers with 2,561 live ads by then; the inventory moves during the day). It makes the picture sharper, and more uncomfortable for Europe. US-headquartered companies disclose a salary somewhere in 23% of cases; EU-headquartered companies in 4.6%. German-headquartered employers sit at the bottom: 3 of 196 disclose anything at all. Of the 171 ads stating a salary at the time of this analysis, 131 (77%) come from employers headquartered in the US or the UK. One month after the EU's own transparency deadline, most of the salary transparency in European tech hiring is imported. The exception proves the rule: 4 of 9 Austrian employers disclose, under a national law that has required it since 2011.

• Austria 44.4% (4 of 9 employers)
• United States 23% (35 of 152 employers)
• United Kingdom 16.9% (11 of 65 employers)
• Other EU 9.1% (5 of 55 employers)
• Switzerland 5.3% (1 of 19 employers)
• Germany 1.5% (3 of 196 employers)

Share of employers, by headquarters country, that state a salary in at least one European job ad. Part of the gap is location mix (US employers disproportionately post UK-located and remote roles, where disclosure is more common, and partly US state pay-transparency laws shaping global ad templates), but the gap is large in both the per-company and the per-ad view. Headquarters classified per company with web verification; 31 of 545 employers could not be attributed and are excluded.

02

The language barrier is smaller than expats think

Of the 861 tech jobs located in Germany, 256 (29.7%) require German. 70% do not. English is required in 92.1% of them. A separate company-level view: 65% of the 242 companies hiring in Germany have at least one role open without German. For international candidates who filter themselves out of the German market on language grounds, the data says the opposite: seven in ten tech roles in Germany are advertised without a German requirement.

Share of tech job ads located in Germany by German language requirement.

03

Remote is a minority, hybrid narrowly leads

Fully remote roles make up 30.2% of the market. Hybrid arrangements narrowly lead at 31.3%, a gap within classification noise, and about one ad in six does not state its remote policy at all, leaving the default unstated.

• Hybrid 31.3%
• Fully remote 30.2%
• Onsite 21%
• Not specified 17.4%

04

What employers actually ask for

Python appears as a hard requirement in 31.1% of all ads, nearly twice as often as any other technology. LLM experience now appears as an explicit requirement in 4.9% of European tech job ads.

• 1 Python
  787
• 2 AWS
  391
• 3 Kubernetes
  310
• 4 SQL
  307
• 5 Java
  285
• 6 TypeScript
  278
• 7 Linux
  243
• 8 Go
  241
• 9 C++
  219
• 10 Docker
  210
• 11 Azure
  195
• 12 GCP
  186
• 13 React
  181
• 14 PostgreSQL
  176
• 15 Terraform
  159
• 16 Git
  151
• 17 JavaScript
  145
• 18 Machine Learning
  137
• 19 LLM
  124
• 20 Node.js
  123

05

The fine print

Beyond salary, ads stay quiet about the things candidates ask first. Visa or sponsorship language appears in fewer than one ad in ten, and the four-day week remains a rounding error.

• Equity or stock options mentioned 28.8%
• Relocation mentioned 11.4%
• Visa or sponsorship mentioned 9.4%
• 4-day week mentioned 0.3%

Sources

• Directive (EU) 2023/970 (Pay Transparency Directive), EUR-Lex
• Noerr: Failure to transpose the EU Pay Transparency Directive into German law by the deadline
• Morgan Lewis: The deadline for transposition has passed, what now?