An employee can access a spreadsheet in a conference room in a Paris office building on any given afternoon to see the exact salaries of all 470 of their coworkers. Not a band of salaries. Not a range. the precise figure. The salary of their manager. Every morning, the person who sits next to them brings oat milk. It turns out that the new employee, who started six months ago, earns more than those who have been there for three years. It’s all visible. This is Alan, an online health insurance provider that has been doing this since its 2016 launch. According to CTO and co-founder Charles Gorintin, complete transparency eliminates the mental burden of determining who should know what. It’s practical. Additionally, it is utterly unthinkable for the majority of workplaces worldwide.
The difference between what Alan has accepted as normal and what the typical office considers intolerable is narrowing. slowly and unevenly, with strong opposition from groups that have profited from the opacity for decades. But coming to an end. Nearly 40% of Gen Z employees now openly discuss their pay at work, which is nearly twice as many as their Gen X counterparts, according to a global survey of 1,850 workers. Even though their employer forbade it, 18% of Gen Z respondents acknowledged talking about compensation. In other words, the generation that grew up sharing everything else about their lives online has begun to feel less constrained by the prohibition itself.
| Topic Overview: The Rise of Salary Transparency in the Modern Workplace | |
|---|---|
| Core Trend | Growing movement toward open salary disclosure, driven by Gen Z preferences, state legislation, and employer equity pressures |
| Key Statistic | Only 31% of employees say salary is openly discussed at their workplace; 37% work under rules explicitly prohibiting pay discussion |
| Gen Z vs. Gen X Gap | Nearly 40% of Gen Z workers openly discuss salaries at work — almost double the rate of Gen X; only 15% of Gen Z find pay talk awkward vs. 24% of Gen X |
| Legislative Momentum | New York State led salary disclosure laws in job postings since 2023; at least six additional states followed with similar legislation in 2025 alone |
| Job Posting Transparency Rate | 36% of newly posted U.S. jobs now include salary data — up roughly 10% year-over-year (Claro Analytics) |
| Company Example | Alan — Paris-based health insurance firm (470 employees) — has operated with fully public salaries since its 2016 founding; all staff see all compensation, including peer-reviewed pay raise decisions |
| Gender Pay Gap Context | OECD data shows the gender pay gap still averages 13% across its 38 member states — a primary driver behind legislative push for transparency |
| Negotiation Impact | At Alan, new hires cannot negotiate salaries individually; all receive automatic 3% annual raises, with additional increases reviewed by colleagues |
| Productivity Link | Research cited by Morgan McKinley found pay transparency policies can positively affect workplace productivity when implemented with clear communication |
| Core Tension | Transparency creates equity pressure and reduces pay gaps — but also risks resentment among workers discovering unexpected pay disparities between colleagues |
More forcefully than many employers had anticipated, legislation is moving in the same direction. In 2023, New York State set the precedent by mandating that employers disclose salary ranges on job advertisements. This move compelled a degree of compensation transparency that many HR departments had carefully avoided for years. In 2025 alone, at least six more states passed their own versions of the legislation. According to Claro Analytics, the percentage of recently posted U.S. jobs with salary information has increased to 36%, up about 10 percentage points from the previous year. Although it’s still a small percentage, the trend is so obvious that it takes conscious effort to ignore it.
The most popular and valid reason for all of this legislative activity is the gender pay gap. According to the OECD, despite decades of softer interventions, the average gender wage gap remains at 13% across its 38 member states. Pay disparities tend to persist in the dark and contract in the light, which makes the case for transparency simple. The discussion of whether two individuals performing equivalent work are paid equally becomes factual rather than theoretical when compensation is visible. For organizations where the answer to that question has been a quiet “no” for a long time, that is unsettling.
What transpires within a team after those numbers become apparent is less talked about and more difficult. Transparency doesn’t land neutrally, according to some research and common sense. When they find out they’re making less than a peer doing comparable work, they often experience a shift rather than anger. An evaluation. When the implicit contract that underpins loyalty turns out to have been unfair, it becomes more difficult to maintain loyalty. According to Ladders, complete organizational salary transparency can cause animosity and internal strife, especially in settings where pay disparities are more a reflection of historical accident or negotiating skill than of actual contribution. Organizations pursuing transparency without also implementing a clear compensation philosophy run the risk of learning this lesson the hard way.
The reason Alan’s model is instructive is that it built the structure around transparency from the beginning rather than forcing it onto an already-existing pay structure. The starting salary cannot be negotiated by new hires. Individual haggling, leveraging competing offers, and paying a premium to the most aggressive person in the room are all prohibited.
Everyone receives an automatic annual raise of 3%, and any further increases are subject to peer review. Although it may sound draining or intrusive, Gorintin’s observation is noteworthy: those who don’t want that level of transparency just don’t apply. Before anyone enters the building, the transparency serves as a filter for cultural fit. The system makes sense. The problem for most businesses is that coherence is precisely what they lack; they want transparency’s reputational benefits without making the structural adjustments necessary to make it equitable.
How far this trend can go before stabilizing is still unknown. Although Gen Z is becoming more and more comfortable with pay transparency, they still make up a small portion of the workforce, and their preferences won’t force businesses with deeply ingrained pay secrecy cultures to quickly adapt. The legislative momentum does indicate that the window of opportunity for organizations to implement transparency on their own terms and at their own pace is closing.
One posting requirement at a time, states are making their own decisions. Observing all of this, one gets the impression that the resistance isn’t really about shielding workers from awkward conversations. It’s about defending pay structures that are more difficult to defend than those at the top would like to acknowledge. It’s time for American workplaces to have this conversation. For many of them, it is also genuinely frightening, and that reaction alone reveals something important.
