Interviewing can be a strenuous process, especially when you’re going almost blindly with not much information about the position besides “company perks” or “compensation according to experience demonstrated”.

The good news? This is about to change! For the salary part at least. No more hoping to piece an offer together from signals and whatever Glassdoor managed to surface.

What is the EU Pay Transparency Directive?

Adopted in June 2023, with a transposition deadline of 7 June 2026 for all EU member states, this directive has a simple goal: equal pay for equal work.

Until now, we had lots of information asymmetry where most people know what they earn but not what they could earn elsewhere or even comparing that amount with their own colleagues.

This directive is coming to fix that, ensuring:

• Recruitment transparency, requiring employers to disclose salary ranges before or during the job posting process;
• Workers’ right to information, giving employees the ability to request pay comparisons with colleagues;
• Gender-neutral pay structures, meaning salaries must be based on objective criteria that can be demonstrated and defended;
• Pay gap reporting requirements, which apply to companies with 100 or more employees, meaning that companies will have to justify and correct when necessary the salary gaps between coworkers.

This directive applies to all employers operating within EU member states and includes non-EU companies that employ people in Europe. Member states that fail to apply it face infringement proceedings, and companies that fail to comply face penalties defined by the national law. 

The salary history question is dead

The most immediate and visible change is also the one of the most structural ones. 

The salary history question, “what do you currently earn?”, has long been one of the most debated practices in recruitment. Some companies have been doing this well for years: structured salary bands, transparent progression criteria, offers based on the role’s value rather than a candidate’s previous payslip, but they remain the exception rather than the norm. 

For too many candidates, the reality has been different. An offer anchored to a previous salary, regardless of how much their skills had grown or what the market was willing to pay, meant that underpayment had a tendency to add up across careers, not out of malice, necessarily, but because the system allowed for it. 

This directive comes to break this cycle by making the question illegal. It comes not to punish the companies that have been doing it wrong, but to raise the bar for everyone and so that the transparency practices become the standard. 

Salary negotiation shouldn’t feel like a game where one side knows the rules and the other is improvising, but rather a conversation between two parties who both have access to the information they need to make a good decision. 

Salary ranges become mandatory

Companies must now disclose the pay range or starting salary before making an offer, either in the job posting itself or before the interview. And no, it’s not possible to post 40,000€-120,000€ to cover all bases. 

Right now, a significant portion of interview processes involve at least one or two rounds before salary is ever mentioned, to let the company assess the candidate before revealing the budget. This means that, sometimes, you already spent time and effort in a recruitment process that, in the end, doesn’t match your financial goals.

This is actually good news for both sides: 

• For companies, it means the pipeline they’re working with is genuinely interested at the compensation level and not just hoping it works out. Candidates who join a company knowing exactly what they signed up for, and why, are less likely to feel misled several months in. Salary transparency at the hiring stage is, in that sense, an investment in retention.
  
• For candidates, it means no more investing three rounds of interviews in a process that was never going to meet your expectations.

A new starting point for careers

The EU Pay Transparency Directive arrives at a moment when the relationship between employers and tech candidates is already being renegotiated because of remote work, AI adoption, generational expectations, and now compensation transparency. 

This Directive doesn’t eliminate negotiation but it changes the starting position. 

Your energy can go into evaluating the role, the team, the technical environment, and the growth trajectory, rather than trying to triangulate compensation from indirect signals. 

The question “what are you currently earning?” is gone. If a recruiter or hiring manager asks anyway, that tells you something meaningful about how this organisation approaches compliance, fairness, and candidate experience. 

If you want to benchmark your salary against the portuguese tech market, download the Tech Talent Trends Report 2026, the most comprehensive analysis of salaries, roles, and hiring trends in Portugal.