Salaries in Job Ads

Infographic about salaries in job ads in the US, supported by the following blog post

Being at the forefront of Meeting room hire means that we meet real people from real businesses all the time. And we know when trying to find a new job, one of the biggest frustrations is job adverts missing one of the most important pieces of information: how much you'll get paid. According to some surveys, nearly 7 in every 10 job seekers consider the salary the most important factor when choosing a new job, and it's been found that job ads without a salary get clicked up to 35% less. And yet you still won't always be able to find it when looking at job adverts.

In fact, when Meetingo analyzed US jobs being advertised on job site Indeed.com, less than 3 out of every 10 jobs (29% of jobs advertised in US cities) were advertised with a salary. Of the cities we looked at, adverts were the least transparent in New York, where only 12% of job listings had a salary. Los Angeles (15%) and Boston (17%) didn't fare much better.

At the other end of the scale, the most salary transparent cities were Denver and Colorado Springs, where 68% and 72% of jobs respectively had a completed salary field. This is unsurprising, as both are in the state of Colorado, which has recently passed laws to make the inclusion of salary in job adverts mandatory.

The type of job you're looking for has a big impact on whether a salary will be advertised - the majority of ads in sectors like Personal Service (76%), Transport (67%) and Travel, Attractions & Events (61%) make it clear what you're likely to be paid. At the other end of the scale, less than a fifth of jobs in Technology (16%), Architecture & Engineering (18%), and Healthcare (20%) listed a salary. Only just behind were Marketing, Advertising & PR jobs (23%) and Science & Research jobs (26%).

Of the salaries that were listed, by far the highest were found in tech, where jobs were advertised as paying over $39,000 on average, followed by Architecture and Engineering ($84,111). The lowest-paid sector was Cleaning & Ground Maintenance followed by Food & Beverage (both paying approximately $32,000 on average)

Comparing the average salary and transparency rates showed that lower-paid sectors were more likely to list a salary than higher-paid sectors, though it's hard to say for sure that this is truly the case reality as many job ads in some sectors failed to include salary information.

Looking at average salary by city, San Francisco and New York came top (unsurprisingly given the number of tech firms in each) with an average salary listing of over $67,000, followed by Los Angeles ($56,000) and Seattle ($55,000)

The cities with the lowest salaries in their job adverts were El Paso, Texas ($34,000 - about $13,000 less than the US average), then Louisville, Kentucky ($38,000) and Virginia Beach, Virginia ($39,000).

These results show that the US has some way to go in the area of salary transparency - similar research we conducted in the UK found that 71% of jobs ads - more than double the number in the US - featured a salary. But this isn't true across the country, as we can see from the example set by Colorado setting it into law that ads have to include details of pay (one of the few such laws in the world - a similar mandate came into effect in the country of Latvia in 2019). Though the value of salary disclosure is still the subject of much debate for employers, for would-be employees the making pay transparency more common than it currently is in the US could only be a good thing.

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