Where the law forces employers to publish pay
Pay disclosure rules by country: what each rule requires, who it binds, what actually gets published and where to find it.
Pay secrecy is the reason most salary figures are guesses. Where the law forces publication, the numbers stop being self-reported and start being auditable — so it is worth knowing whether your market has such a rule, and what it actually covers.
An auditable salary figure is still only one number about one job, and Chapter 3 is about why that is not the same as knowing whether the work is worth doing. It is free, and it is worth reading before you compare two offers on pay alone.
| Country | Rule | Who it binds | What is published | Where | Status | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| India | Companies Act 2013, section 197(12), with rule 5(1) of the remuneration rules | Every listed company | Median employee pay, the change in it, and permanent headcount | The Board's Report, inside the audited annual report | current | yes |
| India | The market regulator's sustainability reporting requirement | The thousand largest listed companies by market value | Median pay split by gender, for staff and for directors separately | The sustainability report, inside the same annual report | current | yes |
| United Kingdom | The Companies (Miscellaneous Reporting) Regulations 2018 | Quoted companies with more than 250 UK employees | Pay at the 25th, 50th and 75th percentile of UK staff | The directors' remuneration report | current | yes |
| United States | The securities regulator's pay ratio rule | Public reporting companies, with several classes exempt | Median employee total pay, and the ratio to the chief executive | The proxy statement or annual filing | current | yes |
| Australia | The Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012 | Employers with 100 or more employees | Median and average pay gaps, and average pay by quartile | The agency's public data explorer, searchable by employer | current | yes |
| Spain | The equal pay register regulation of 2020 | Every employer, whatever its size | Nothing publicly. The register is internal, and a worker without representation sees only percentage gaps | Held by the employer; disclosed to worker representatives where they exist | current | yes |
| Brazil | The salary equality law of 2023 | Private employers with 100 or more employees | What women are paid as a share of what men are paid, within five broad occupational groups | The labour ministry's portal, searched by the employer's tax number | current | yes |
| Japan | The women's workplace participation act | Employers with more than 300 employees, and more than 100 from April 2026 | The gender wage gap, split by permanent and non-permanent staff | The company's own site, or the labour ministry's database | current | yes |
| European Union | The pay transparency directive | Member states first, then employers of 150 or more from 2027 and 100 or more from 2031 | Pay gaps by sex, broken down by category of worker | National law, once each member state has written it | coming | yes |
Two words that mean something specific here
Unverified means the row has not been confirmed against the publisher's own primary source. It is a lead worth following, not a fact worth quoting. Rows are marked this way rather than dropped because a lead you can check is more use than a silence you cannot.
None found is a statement about the search, not about the world. It records that somebody looked and came back empty. Several of the bodies listed here publish almost nothing in English and work mainly through mediation, so an absence in this column is at least as likely to be a limit of the search as a fact about enforcement.
Where a row names a nearest equivalent, that equivalent is usually much weaker than the thing it stands in for, and the row says so. The point of publishing the weaker answer is that you can see what you are being offered instead.