Pay in Every Job Advert? 15.3% of 49,785 Live Adverts in London, Manchester and Edinburgh State a Salary

On 14 July 2026 the government opened a 15-week consultation on equal pay reform, run by the Office for Equality and Opportunity under equalities minister Seema Malhotra. For job seekers the key line sits in the government's own consultation document, which "proposes introducing a requirement for all employers to publish pay information in job adverts". According to Conventus Law, the consultation closes on 27 October 2026, and the level of pay information required — exact salary, range or benchmark — is not yet decided.

Here is the market such a requirement would regulate, measured live — in three cities, not the whole of the UK. As of 16 July 2026, ResuMinder indexes 49,785 live job adverts with complete descriptions across London, Manchester and Edinburgh. Of those, 7,609 state a salary: 15.3%. The bar is mechanical: an advert counts as disclosing only if it carries a parseable annual-equivalent minimum between £16,000 and £400,000. "Competitive salary" therefore counts as silence — as do zero placeholders, non-GBP figures and genuine disclosures the parser cannot resolve — so 15.3% is a conservative reading. These are live vacancies in ResuMinder's index, not filled jobs and not official statistics.

A 6-point spread between cities — read the employer mix first

London is the largest market and the least forthcoming: 14.1% of its 43,201 live adverts state a salary, against 19.8% across Manchester's 5,444 and 20.1% across Edinburgh's 2,244.

Read the employer mix before the gap. Edinburgh's largest advertisers are the University of Edinburgh, Leonardo, the City of Edinburgh Council and Heriot-Watt University; Manchester's are led by the University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University; London's is headed by JPMorgan Chase, ahead of UCL, King's College London and Imperial College London. A stock heavy in universities and councils — where pay commonly follows published scales — is consistent with more adverts carrying a number. Employer mix likely explains part of the gap: read it as a fact about each city's advertised stock, not employer behaviour by city. Contract work also makes up a proportionally larger slice of Edinburgh's stock, so an advert-level pay rule would touch relatively more contract adverts there.

The real divide is between roles: teachers at 63.8%, sales managers at 0.8%

The consultation asks whether every employer should publish pay; the snapshot shows which corners of the market already work that way. Figures combine all three cities — single-city role samples are too small to lean on.

Teachers and nurses, at 63.8% and 48.1%, are consistent with pay that commonly follows published national scales; every other role we track sits at 9.8% or below. The extremes — 63.8% against 0.8% — show how unevenly a requirement would land: part of the public-service market already operates roughly as ministers propose, while the commercial mainstream mostly stays quiet.

What this means if you're applying now

Openings are scarce — UK vacancies are at their lowest since early 2021, with the Office for National Statistics estimating 707,000 vacancies for March to May 2026 — and scarcity raises the cost of applying blind on pay.

• Price the silence in. With 15.3% of adverts stating a salary — and software, marketing and sales close to silent — expect to apply without an in-field anchor; among the commercial roles we track, project management and the analyst roles disclose most and offer the nearest written benchmarks.
• Read "competitive salary" as no information. In our data it counts as non-disclosure.
• Treat advertised figures as floors. Every salary here is the advertised minimum — the bottom of the range where a range is posted, the stated figure where only one is given. Across the 7,609 disclosing adverts, the median advertised minimum is £43,482; our June advertised-salaries report measured range midpoints, so its medians are not comparable with this one.
• Ask before interview. HR Review reports pay information before interview, rather than in the advert, as the alternative under discussion — no need to wait for legislation to make that request.
• Have your say. The consultation runs until 27 October 2026, and the level of pay information required is one of its open questions.

A note on comparability: our June reports on these cities — advertised salaries and permanent versus contract adverts — drew on smaller samples with a lower salary floor, so rates are not comparable across the series.

The stock is current: 4,108 of the 49,785 adverts (8.3%) were posted in the past seven days, and 49.5% in the past 30 days. Whatever level of pay information ministers settle on, the baseline in these three cities today is 15.3%.

Methodology

• Figures come from live job postings indexed by ResuMinder for London, Manchester and Edinburgh as of 16 July 2026 (complete crawled descriptions only). They describe live advertised vacancies in ResuMinder's index — not every advert live in these cities, not filled jobs, not the whole of the UK, and not official employment statistics.
• Sample sizes: 49,785 live adverts combined (London 43,201; Manchester 5,444; Edinburgh 2,244); 7,609 carry a qualifying salary. An advert naming more than one city counts in each city's sample but once in the combined total (1,104 did), so city counts do not sum to the combined figure.
• City samples are keyword matches on the advertised location string, with non-UK homonym locations excluded (e.g. Manchester, New Hampshire; London, Ontario; Edinburgh, Indiana). This removed 2,435 adverts from the London sample, 2,313 from Manchester and 154 from Edinburgh.
• An advert counts as stating a salary only if it carries a parseable annual-equivalent minimum between £16,000 and £400,000. Zero placeholders (538 adverts), positive figures below £16,000 (329) and disclosures that cannot be parsed to an annual GBP amount count as non-disclosing, so the quoted rates are conservative.
• Salary figures are based on the advertised minimum — the lower bound of the posted range, or the stated figure where only one is given — filtered to £16,000–£400,000 annual. Percentiles are true percentiles (linear interpolation); the combined median rests on the 7,609 qualifying adverts.
• Role figures are keyword matches within the combined three-city sample and cover only the eight roles listed; samples range from 551 (finance analyst) to 1,299 (teacher) and can overlap.
• Employer mentions count adverts by the listed company-name string; name variants (for example "The University of Edinburgh" and "University of Edinburgh") are not merged.