WFA Research
Most remote job listings still do not mention money. Whether yours does turns out to depend less on the role than on which countries the employer is willing to hire from.
Updated September 3, 2026
Pay secrecy is the default in hiring, and remote hiring has not changed that. Across 19,617 active listings collected from employers' own applicant tracking systems, 22.8% state a salary or a range. The other 77.2% say nothing about money at all.
Pay transparency legislation is overwhelmingly American. A majority of US states now require a pay range in job postings, and a remote role open across the US will touch several of them. So whether an employer says it can hire in the United States works as a rough proxy for whether the listing sits inside the reach of that law.
A remote job whose employer will hire in the United States is about 3.4 times more likely to tell you what it pays than one that will not.
This is an association, not proof of causation, and the honest reading matters. Employers hiring into the US differ from those that are not, by sector, by size and by how mature their recruiting systems are, and this data cannot separate those factors from the effect of the law. What it does show is that the transparency a job seeker experiences depends heavily on where the employer is willing to hire.
There is an uncomfortable corollary. The roles open to the widest set of people are the ones least likely to name a figure.
Listings open worldwide disclose pay 23.7% of the time against 39.8% for those limited to a single country. Someone searching for genuinely location-independent work is searching in the part of the market that says least about money.
| Field | Listings | With pay stated | Disclosure rate | Median annual floor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI & ML | 420 | 164 | 39.0% | $180,000 |
| Legal | 404 | 135 | 33.4% | $115,800 |
| Data Science | 908 | 241 | 26.5% | $142,750 |
| Development | 5,128 | 1,321 | 25.8% | $163,000 |
| Operations | 1,042 | 267 | 25.6% | $106,551 |
| Security | 242 | 62 | 25.6% | $151,000 |
| Healthcare | 1,048 | 267 | 25.5% | $100,000 |
| Marketing | 966 | 241 | 24.9% | $121,400 |
| Product | 779 | 192 | 24.6% | $175,000 |
| Customer Success | 863 | 210 | 24.3% | $112,200 |
| HR | 285 | 68 | 23.9% | $103,000 |
| Finance | 671 | 157 | 23.4% | $123,372 |
| Sales | 2,709 | 631 | 23.3% | $130,000 |
| Design | 391 | 90 | 23.0% | $152,900 |
| Project Mgmt | 491 | 105 | 21.4% | $115,045 |
| consulting | 431 | 90 | 20.9% | $120,000 |
| Content | 248 | 47 | 19.0% | $90,000 |
| Education | 133 | 22 | 16.5% | — |
| Support | 441 | 71 | 16.1% | $86,500 |
| Admin & VA | 142 | 14 | 9.9% | — |
| coaching | 144 | 9 | 6.3% | — |
Among listings quoting an annual base range in US dollars, the median advertised floor is $140,000 across 3,867 roles. That is the bottom of the published range, not what anyone was paid, and it covers only the minority of listings that publish one.
A further 287 listings quote an hourly rate and 144 a monthly one. They are reported separately rather than folded in, because converting them would mean assuming hours nobody stated.
Listings come directly from employers' own applicant tracking systems: Greenhouse, Ashby, Workday, Lever, Personio, Recruitee, SmartRecruiters and Breezy. No aggregator or third-party board is used as a source. The sample is 19,617 listings active on September 3, 2026. Duplicate title-and-employer pairs are about 0.5% of rows and are left in, since each is a distinct posting on its employer's own board.
A listing counts when the employer's applicant tracking system carried a salary field. Free-text mentions of pay inside a job description are not counted, because they cannot be parsed reliably enough to compare.
Computed on the lower bound of the advertised range, using only records typed BASE, so on-target earnings and commission never enter it. Restricted to amounts between USD 20,000 and 1,000,000 to drop parse errors, and median rather than mean because the distribution is right-skewed.
An explicit pay period is recorded for only a minority of listings. Where it is absent, an amount above USD 20,000 is treated as annual, on the basis that an hourly or monthly figure does not reach five digits. That is an inference, and it is why hourly and monthly roles are reported separately instead of being merged into one median that would quietly mix pay units.
The comparison splits listings by whether the employer stated it can hire in the United States. Listings where the scope was not stated, or where no countries were recorded, are excluded rather than counted as non-US: folding “we do not know” into “not the US” would manufacture the finding.
A group appears only with at least 100 listings, and a median only with at least 30 priced listings. Groups below those thresholds are omitted rather than shown with a warning nobody reads. Withheld here: Category "ecommerce": 30 listings, below the 100 minimum.
It measures the listings WFA Digital collects, not the global remote job market. The collection skews towards companies publishing on a modern applicant tracking system, which favours technology and English-language employers. Disclosure is measured per listing, not per employer, so a company that states pay on some roles and not others contributes to both counts. And advertised pay is what the employer published, never what anyone was paid.
Every listing says which countries it can hire from before you apply. Browse by where you live or by field.