--- title: "Pay Range Builder from Official Statistics — Geo-Parity" description: "A defensible salary range for a role in 35+ countries: floor, midpoint and ceiling anchored on ILO measured earnings, with the gender pay gap. Not legal advice." canonical: "https://geo-parity.com/pay-range/" generator: geo-parity markdown twin --- For employers · Pay transparency # What range should this job advertise? Since 7 June 2026 the EU Pay Transparency Directive has required employers to state a starting salary or pay range before interview. Every tool built for that is sold to HR departments from about €2,500 a year, and most of them want your payroll data first. The underlying statistics are public. This turns them into a range you can defend. ## Pay Range Builder Pick a country, a broad occupation and a level. The range is anchored on measured earnings where a country publishes them, and on the modelled national wage ladder where it does not — the result always says which. Range floor $37,812 41.3th percentile locally Midpoint $47,484 56.6th percentile locally Range ceiling $59,628 70.9th percentile locally Measured: ILO reports pay for this occupation in this country (2025). Measured gender pay gap in this occupation: 20.4% (women's median against men's). Reported separately — it is not built into the range above. Before you publish this - This is a market range built from official statistics. It is not legal advice and does not certify compliance with any pay-transparency law — whether a range meets your obligations is a question for your own adviser. - ISCO-08 major groups are broad families of work, not job titles: one group can cover very different roles. Treat this as the level of the group, and narrow it with your own knowledge of the role. - Figures are gross pay before tax, for employees only. They exclude bonuses paid irregularly, equity, and employer social contributions. - The gender pay gap shown is a RAW MONTHLY gap: it controls for nothing, and because it is monthly rather than hourly it also reflects differences in hours worked. That makes it roughly ten points wider than the hourly gap Eurostat publishes. It measures what women are paid against what men are paid, not unequal pay for identical work. ## What this is, and what it is not This is a **market range built from official statistics** — the ILO's measured earnings by occupation, positioned on a wage distribution calibrated from World Bank data. It is **not legal advice**, and it does not certify that any range satisfies the Directive or any national law implementing it. Nobody here is qualified to make that judgement; your own adviser is. The occupation groups are broad by construction, the figures are gross and cover employees only, and for countries where the ILO publishes nothing the range is modelled rather than measured. The result always tells you which of those you are looking at. Use it as evidence you can point to, alongside what you know about the role. ## Questions - **Does this make my job advert compliant with the EU Pay Transparency Directive?**: No, and nothing here should be read as saying so. The Directive has applied since 7 June 2026 and requires employers to give a starting salary or pay range in the advert or before interview, to stop asking for salary history, and to publish the criteria behind pay and progression. This tool builds a market range from official statistics — it is one input to that decision, not legal advice, and whether a given range meets your obligations in a given member state is a question for your own adviser. - **Where do the numbers come from?**: Measured gross monthly earnings of employees by occupation, published by the ILO (ILOSTAT), for 35 countries — dataset refreshed 2026-09-02. Those are positioned on a log-normal wage distribution calibrated from World Bank GNI per capita and the Gini index, which is what lets the tool express a level as a percentile of local pay rather than a multiple. Where the ILO publishes nothing for a country, the range falls back to that modelled ladder alone and the result says so explicitly. - **How precise is an 'occupation'?**: Not very, and that is the honest limit of free data. The ILO reports the ten ISCO-08 major groups, so 'Professionals' covers a surgeon, a solicitor and a junior developer in one figure. Use the range as the level of the broad group and narrow it with what you know about the specific role — a band presented as more precise than its source is worse than no band. - **Why is seniority a percentile rather than a multiplier?**: Because a multiplier means different things in different countries. "Senior = 1.4× the median" lands near the top decile in Denmark and barely above the middle in South Africa, so the same rule would describe two completely different positions in the local market. Levels here are offsets within each country's own distribution — entry level, mid level, senior, lead / principal — so the same level means the same standing wherever you hire. The percentile bands themselves are a stated convention, not a measurement: no free dataset breaks pay down by seniority within an occupation. - **Why show the gender pay gap next to the range?**: Because it is measured, and because averaging it away is exactly what a pay band can quietly do. The gap shown is the female shortfall against male median earnings in that occupation, derived from the same ILO rows as the range itself. It is never folded into the midpoint — a 'fair' number built by averaging over a real gap would launder it, which is the opposite of what publishing pay information is for. - **Is the pay figure gross or net?**: Gross, before tax, for employees only. It excludes irregular bonuses, equity and employer social contributions. If you want the take-home side, the freelance rate calculator and contractor comparison handle tax; do not compare a figure from this page against one of theirs. ## Related - [Local salary benchmarker](https://geo-parity.com/wage-bands/) — the full national wage ladder this range is positioned against. - [Cross-border salary localizer](https://geo-parity.com/?tab=salary) — what the same role should pay in another country. - [Contractor vs employee](https://geo-parity.com/contractor-calculator/) — the take-home side, after tax. - [Everything in Earn](https://geo-parity.com/earn/). --- Source: Geo-Parity — https://geo-parity.com/pay-range/