The public sector publishes what it pays. The private sector, at the same level of seniority, almost never does.
Public sector
100.0%
state pay · n=1,069
Private sector
5.1%
state pay · n=829
That gap is not a story about generosity. Public-sector pay is published because it is set by policy on national scales, so an advert has nothing to withhold. Private-sector pay is a negotiating position, and an advert that names a number gives it up.
Seniority makes it worse, not better
The reasonable assumption is that senior roles are more open about pay, because the candidates are harder to attract and their time is worth more than a wasted interview. The opposite holds. Among private-sector roles we classify as leadership — director, head of, chief, VP — just 1.3% state pay (n=75) — the lowest of any profession here large enough to report.
By profession, private sector only
The public sector is excluded here — at 100.0% it would swamp any comparison between professions.
| Profession | Roles | State pay |
|---|---|---|
| Leadership | 75 | 1.3% |
| Sales and marketing | 91 | 3.3% |
| Engineering | 209 | 5.3% |
| Data and AI | 174 | 6.9% |
| Product and design | 70 | 7.1% |
Professions with fewer than 50 private-sector roles are left out rather than shown with a rate that could move several points on one listing: Clinical and medical, Finance, Legal and compliance.
What we cannot tell you: private-sector day rates
Contract roles state their rate 100.0% of the time (n=46), against 57.5% for permanent salaries (n=1,852) — and that comparison is worth almost nothing, which is why it is here rather than higher up. 46 of 46 contract listings come from the same public-sector board as the 100.0% figure above. It is not evidence that day-rate work is more open; it is the same public-sector result wearing a different label.
The honest position is that we cannot measure private-sector day-rate disclosure, because the employer job boards we reach carry almost no contract work at all. Anyone claiming a UK-wide contract disclosure rate from a sample like this one would be reporting healthcare locum work and calling it the market.
It is a policy, not an oversight
Of 37 private employers advertising 8 or more senior roles here — enough that each has a practice rather than a one-off — just 1 states pay on any of them. An employer running dozens of adverts without a figure is not forgetting.
Who does publish
Everything above is about absence, which is the easy half. This is the other one, and it is short.
249 public-sector organisations on this board state pay on every advert. That is policy rather than choice — national scales are published, so an advert has nothing to withhold — which makes it the less interesting half of the answer.
The interesting half is who publishes when they need not. In the private sector, these are the employers advertising 3 or more senior roles here who state a salary on most or all of them:
- Airbnb states pay on 6 of 6 roles
- GoCardless states pay on 3 of 3 roles
- Monzo states pay on 32 of 37 roles
That is the whole list. It is short because publishing a salary at this level is genuinely unusual, not because we set a high bar — an employer qualifies by advertising 3 or more roles here and stating pay on at least half of them, and the list is recomputed every time the board rebuilds.
There is no way to buy a place on it, and we are not naming the employers who do not publish — that would be a different page with a different purpose. The only route onto this one is to state the salary.
How this was measured, and what it is not
Every UK role advertised at £100,000+ a year or £500+ a day that we could reach on 25 October 2026: 1,898 listings from NHS Jobs and the employer job boards we ingest. A listing counts as stating pay only when the advert gives a figure we can read and quote back; “competitive”, “depends on experience” and silence all count as not stating.
This is not a random sample of UK jobs. The private-sector half comes from employers’ own applicant-tracking boards, found by testing candidate names, which over-represents technology and venture-backed companies and reaches almost no law firms, insurers or accountancy practices. The public-sector half is one national job board covering health. Both halves are senior roles only, by construction.
We know how much that matters, because we got it wrong once. An early version of this measurement reported 59% disclosure from seven employer boards chosen for having names easy to guess. Widening the sample put the real figure at 10.1%. The arithmetic was never wrong; the sample was, and no amount of checking the sum would have found it. Every figure on this page carries the number it was calculated from for that reason.
Read it as a measurement of senior UK roles reachable on public job boards and employer career sites, not as a census. Re-measured each time the board rebuilds.
Free to cite or reproduce with a link to this page. If you want the underlying breakdown for something you are writing, ask us.