Is Your Organisation Ready for Full Pay Transparency?

Unless you’ve had your head in the compliance sand, you’ll know the countdown to the EU Pay Transparency Directive is well underway. By June 2026, companies must demonstrate how they set pay and be able to share that information. The directive also strengthens gender pay gap reporting, so workers across the EU have a clearer view of fairness at work.

But pay transparency is about so much more than the latest legislation. It’s also a cultural expectation for the modern workforce. According to Mercer’s Global Pay Transparency Report, nearly seven in ten organisations say job candidates now expect insight into pay practices before they apply, and more than half report similar pressure from existing employees.

Full pay transparency is one option — in fact, it’s the most extreme expression of openness around compensation. But is it the right move for your organisation? This article explores: 

• What full pay transparency looks like in practice
• The pitfalls companies often face when they move too quickly
• A practical readiness framework to help you decide if, and when, to take the leap into sharing the nuts and bolts of pay

What full pay transparency really means 

Full pay transparency is the practice of sharing information about employee compensation in public. This might sound like a leak or an exposé, but in reality, it’s an intentional step companies take to improve pay equity in their organisations and establish themselves as a trustworthy employer. 

Any type of pay transparency sits on a spectrum, with full pay secrecy at one end and full pay transparency at the other. Companies willing to be 100% open and honest about their pay practices share the following information both internally with current employees and externally with the general public: 

• All pay information, including bands and individual salaries 
• The company’s pay structure 
• The criteria behind specific pay decisions 

Buffer is a famous example of a company committed to full pay transparency, having shared salary details on its website for more than a decade. The company publishes its salary formula, along with an in-depth table, including the following for each Buffer employee: 

• Name (most include a profile photo) 
• Team 
• Title 
• Role 
• Location 
• Salary 

Internally, Jenny Terry, VP of Finance and Operations at Buffer, shared a recent example of how normal it is to share individual salaries during internal team discussions. 

“Today, a teammate shared my paystub in a public Slack channel. On purpose. This is what transparency looks like in practice. We were fixing a small HSA contribution issue, and it made sense to do it openly. No side messages. No awkwardness. Just a few teammates solving a problem together. It might sound a little uncomfortable, but for us it's just another day at Buffer. That’s what transparent pay really means: not just publishing a salary spreadsheet, but building a culture where transparency builds trust and makes everything simpler.” 

4 potential pitfalls of committing to full pay transparency 

Even if you’re onboard with the concept of full pay transparency in theory, it’s quite another to suddenly shine a spotlight on your salary numbers — even if you’ve put plenty of groundwork into your decision. Here are four common challenges to be aware of. 

Transparency can be too rigid 

Once salary information and pay formulas are public, it becomes even harder to make small adjustments. Any change, whether fixing an anomaly or creating a new role, must be explained and justified to everyone.

At Buffer, this level of openness has sometimes slowed the team’s ability to adapt. Each tweak to its salary formula can mean revisiting multiple roles to keep things consistent, which adds time and complexity to decisions. In an open letter, CEO Joel Gascoigne shared: ‍

“This can especially be the case with brand-new roles, which we have to add to the formula. It also applies to flaws we discover in the process of hiring someone, which we then have to run through and determine if we are in a position to adjust many salaries rather than just one.” 

The main point here: while transparency creates accountability, it also limits flexibility. Without the right systems in place, it can hold back progress rather than support it. 

Transparency amplifies every mistake 

At its core, transparency is meant to be a positive thing. And it is. The problem though, is that when everything is visible, even honest errors, like a misapplied salary band, are immediately exposed.

Unfortunately, Buffer learned this firsthand during a high-pressure season. The company accidentally made a salary offer at a lower level of seniority than appropriate and an incorrect location band. Although several team members noticed the anomaly, Gascoigne felt that Buffer’s team members might have “lost some trust in our salary approach; team members could not know for sure that we did not intentionally break away from the standardized formula.”

Transparency can expose cultural weakness 

Full pay transparency assumes a level of trust that not every organisation has nurtured. When employees don’t feel safe discussing pay, or when managers aren’t confident leading those conversations, openness can create discomfort instead of clarity.

Transparency is meant to remove secrecy, but it can just as easily uproot tensions. When salaries are first revealed, it’s human nature for people to want to speculate and question fairness more openly. Without training leaders to model openness and practise great communication, it won’t take long for transparency to magnify existing cultural cracks.

For many companies, this is the hardest part of the journey. The data can be perfect, but if the culture isn’t ready, transparency can damage rather than deepen trust. 

Transparency increases administrative and emotional load 

An open pay system doesn’t run on goodwill alone — it takes time and effort to maintain. HR teams are charged with keeping salary data current and preparing clear explanations for every decision they make. Managers carry a heavier emotional load too, having more direct, high-stakes pay conversations and fielding comparisons across teams.

Of course, none of these points means full pay transparency isn’t worth pursuing. But it does mean the work multiplies. The process that once ran like clockwork in the background now happens in public, with documentation and dialogue at every stage. Unless organisations plan and resource for that reality, even well-intentioned transparency can lead to burnout and backlash — all the bad stuff. 

Your 5-step pay transparency readiness framework  

Before your organisation can go fully transparent with pay, make sure you feel confident about the strength of your foundations. Below are five areas every company should assess before publishing pay data, along with practical questions to guide your readiness check.

1. Data readiness: Are your numbers reliable?

Transparency only works if your data can withstand the scrutiny — and you can expect plenty of it! Everyone from your current team members and prospective candidates, to competitor businesses and even journalists will suddenly have access to your data. So, if your compensation data has been living in spreadsheets with outdated benchmarks or mismatched titles, you’ll want to completely overhaul it and make the data watertight before the big reveal to the outside world. 

Ask yourself:

☑ Do we have clearly defined salary bands for every role?
☑ Are our market benchmarks current and relevant?
☑ Have we identified and corrected any outliers or unexplained pay gaps?

Pro tip: Tools like Figures can help by providing real-time benchmarking and salary band calibration so you can be sure your numbers will hold up under pressure.

2. Structural readiness: Do you have the framework to explain pay?

Even the most accurate data will fall flat if employees don’t understand how it all fits together. Job architecture, levelling frameworks, and a clear compensation philosophy give transparency its backbone. Without them, openness can look arbitrary — or worse, unfair.

Ask yourself:

☑ Do we have a consistent levelling framework and job architecture?
☑ Can we clearly explain how each role fits within our pay structure?
☑ Is our compensation philosophy documented and easy to communicate?

Pro tip: Before you share salaries, make sure you can also share the story behind them to explain why the numbers make sense. 

3. Cultural readiness: Can your organisation handle open conversations about pay?

 If pay has always been a private topic, suddenly making it public can create discomfort or defensiveness. Before you publish salaries, consider whether your people are ready for that level of visibility. Transparency depends on psychological safety, and safety comes from consistent, respectful dialogue. 

Ask yourself:

☑ Do our people feel safe asking questions about pay?
☑ Is there genuine trust between employees and leadership?
☑ Have we built inclusion and fairness into our everyday culture, not just our policies?

Pro tip: Start small. Encourage open dialogue about how pay is determined before you share what everyone earns. Trust grows with practice, not policy. 

4. Leadership readiness: Is your executive team aligned and prepared to lead by example?

Pay transparency without leadership alignment is a recipe for confusion. If executives aren’t fully onboard, or aren’t willing to model openness themselves, employees will smell a rat and question the hesitation. 

Ask yourself:

☑ Is our leadership team unified on what transparency means for us?
☑ Are we ready to answer difficult questions and stand by the answers?
☑ Are we modelling the openness we expect from everyone else?

Pro tip: Before going public, run a “leadership transparency rehearsal.” Bring your executive team together and role-play the toughest questions employees might ask, such as “Why do some roles pay more?” or “Would you share your own salary?”

5. Communication readiness: How will you explain what people see?

Publishing your pay data opens the doors to conversation. Once information is out there, the public will interpret it through their own lens. But without clear, proactive communication, it’s easy for misunderstanding to spread quickly.

Ask yourself:

☑ Do we have a clear plan for explaining what the data means, and what it doesn’t?
☑ Are FAQs, manager talking points, and message templates ready to go?
☑ How will we handle feedback or criticism once pay data is live?

Pro tip: Open your transparency rollout with a clear statement of pay principles. This can be as simple as crafting one paragraph explaining why you pay the way you do. Use it in every Q&A, deck, or policy update before showing the numbers.

Prepare for full pay transparency with Figures 

When you’re ready to move forward with disclosing your salary information in full, Figures offers a purpose-built compensation-management platform designed to support your organisation with: 

• Real-time market benchmarking based on millions of data points that keeps your current salaries fair and competitive 
• Automated salary band creation and maintenance. You’ll ditch the spreadsheets in favour of dynamic, role-based ranges that update as market conditions change.
• Transparent workflows and pay review tools that enable managers to make compensation decisions with confidence. 

Want more advice about pay transparency? Download our comprehensive transparency checklist here, or take a personalised tour of our platform by booking a free Figures demo.