In this Coffee Talk Special, Henrike von Platen speaks with Margrét Vilborg Bjarnadóttir, compensation researcher and expert on pay transparency developments, about what published pay ranges in job advertisements mean once pay information becomes a visible signal in the labor market.
The discussion centers on a basic but often unresolved question: what exactly is a published pay range? As the exchange makes clear, the answer is not uniform. Observations from U.S. transparency legislation show that once salary disclosure rules take effect, compliance itself cannot be taken for granted. In the examples referenced, fewer than half of organizations complied with the requirement to publish salary information. At the same time, the ranges that do appear are not always meaningful. Some are so broad that they provide little practical guidance, which raises an immediate governance question about whether disclosure alone produces clarity.
The exchange also highlights that published ranges are shaped by internal pay architecture and by assumptions about how candidates interpret them. Organizations may choose to show a full salary band or only the portion in which they realistically expect to hire. That choice is not neutral. It reflects how an employer manages expectations and whether it can explain how pay placement within a range is determined. This shifts the issue from disclosure as a formal requirement to disclosure as a communication and governance practice. If a company cannot explain why an individual would be placed at one point rather than another, the range remains only partially informative.
A further point in the conversation is that range width cannot be assessed in the abstract. A narrow or broad range may each be defensible depending on the nature of the role, the degree of job variability, and the organization’s pay policy. Where work is highly standardized, tighter ranges may be more consistent with the actual structure of the role. Where roles involve greater variability, organizations may maintain wider ranges, including where they want room to differentiate pay. This means that published percentages alone do not establish whether a range is appropriate; they only become meaningful in relation to job content and compensation logic.
The conversation also points to the fact that this area is still developing. Early observations suggest that after transparency legislation is introduced, ranges may initially widen rather than narrow, as organizations act cautiously while practices are still unsettled. This indicates that the publication of pay information does not automatically produce immediate precision. Instead, it may first expose how immature existing processes and explanations still are. In that sense, published ranges do not merely reveal pay levels; they also reveal the state of an organization’s readiness to justify and communicate them.
Finally, the exchange raises a broader labor-market implication. As more salary information becomes publicly available, the data itself becomes a resource that can be collected, analyzed, and commercialized. Organizations may be able to buy and use this information to benchmark competitors’ wage-setting practices, while individual applicants may not have comparable capacity to interpret the same market data. The discussion therefore identifies a possible new asymmetry: even where transparency increases, the ability to use transparent information may remain uneven. This places published pay ranges within a wider governance context, extending beyond compliance in job advertising to the evolving structure of information and power in the labor market.