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For generations, salary was one of the most closely guarded subjects in the American workplace. Employees could spend years sitting beside one another without knowing whether the person performing essentially the same job was earning thousands of dollars more. Employers rarely volunteered the information, workers were often reluctant to ask, and the cultural message was unmistakable: what you earn is private.

That culture is rapidly disappearing. Younger workers are more willing to discuss compensation, governments are requiring employers to disclose salary ranges, job seekers increasingly expect pay information before applying, and employees have become more sophisticated about benchmarking their market value. The shift has produced real benefits. Greater access to compensation information can expose unexplained disparities, strengthen workers' negotiating positions and force companies to develop more disciplined compensation systems.

But the movement toward transparency has created a new workplace question that receives far less attention: Does believing in pay transparency entitle someone to know exactly what every colleague earns?

The answer is more complicated than the transparency debate sometimes suggests. There is an important distinction between employees voluntarily sharing compensation information for their mutual benefit and one employee systematically gathering, recording and comparing the personal compensation of coworkers who may never have agreed to participate. Transparency can empower workers. It can also become intrusive when consent and context disappear from the conversation.

Salary Secrecy Is Losing Its Grip

The generational change is substantial. Bankrate research found that nearly 42% of Gen Z workers and 40% of millennials had shared salary information with a coworker or another professional contact, compared with 31% of Gen X workers and just 19% of baby boomers. More recent research continues to show the same generational divide. A 2025 international survey of 1,850 employees found that nearly 40% of Gen Z respondents openly discussed salary at work, almost twice the rate reported among Gen X workers.

Other research suggests salary conversations are becoming surprisingly commonplace across the workforce. BambooHR's 2025 compensation research found that 47% of employees had discussed their salary with a coworker, while 42% reported doing so during the previous year. Among Gen Z employees, 21% had disclosed their salary to a coworker within just the previous month, compared with only 4% of baby boomers. Meanwhile, 77% of boomers said they had never disclosed their salary to a coworker.

That generational divide matters because organizations increasingly contain employees operating under dramatically different assumptions about financial privacy. One worker may consider asking a colleague's salary an ordinary professional conversation. Another may regard the same question as deeply personal. Neither attitude disappears simply because workplace culture is becoming more transparent.

The distinction becomes even clearer when researchers ask employees what kind of transparency they actually want. Research published in Business Horizons found strong support for employers explaining how compensation is determined. Nearly 46% of respondents wanted substantive explanations of pay-setting processes, and another 33% wanted that level of disclosure combined with training for employees and managers. Yet support became much more fragmented when transparency meant revealing individual salaries. Only 27.4% favored disclosure of everyone's wages, although that figure climbed to 38.5% among Gen Z respondents and fell to 12.5% among baby boomers.

In other words, wanting a transparent compensation system is not necessarily the same thing as wanting everyone's paycheck displayed for everyone else to inspect.

Why Pay Transparency Has Become So Powerful

There is a compelling economic argument behind the transparency movement. Information asymmetry has historically placed employees at a disadvantage because employers generally know what everyone earns while individual workers know only their own compensation. Without meaningful benchmarks, an employee can have difficulty determining whether a raise is competitive, whether a job offer is reasonable or whether two employees performing comparable work are being treated differently.

That matters because measurable earnings disparities remain. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that median weekly earnings for the nation's full-time wage and salary workers were $1,204 in 2025. Women earned a median $1,089 per week compared with $1,326 for men, meaning women's median weekly earnings were 82.1% of men's. Among Hispanic full-time workers, women had median weekly earnings of $889 compared with $1,003 for Hispanic men.

Research also indicates that transparency can influence compensation outcomes. A study of Canadian public-sector salary-disclosure laws found that disclosure reduced the gender pay gap among university faculty by approximately 20% to 40%. Research examining Denmark's wage-transparency legislation found an approximately two-percentage-point reduction in the gender pay gap, equivalent to a 13% decline relative to its pre-legislation level.

More recent American research points in the same direction. A 2025 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper examining state laws requiring salary information in job postings found that the policies increased the share of postings containing salary information by approximately 30 percentage points. Across three datasets, researchers estimated wage increases of roughly 1.3% to 3.6%, without finding corresponding reductions in employment or job postings.

This is why dismissing pay transparency as employees simply being nosy misses the economic argument. Information can change bargaining power.

But Transparency Is Not the Same as Surveillance

The more difficult issue begins when voluntary disclosure becomes systematic collection.

Imagine two employees performing comparable jobs. One says, "I'm making about $72,000. Are you somewhere around there?" The other voluntarily responds, and the two discover a significant discrepancy. That conversation can provide useful information and potentially identify a compensation issue worth raising with management.

Now imagine something different. An employee approaches colleagues throughout the organization asking each person for an exact salary, bonus or hourly rate. Those numbers are recorded in a personal spreadsheet alongside individual names, titles or departments. Contractors are added. Part-time employees are added. Managers are added. Perhaps executives are added. The document effectively becomes an unofficial compensation database assembled without the organization's involvement and, potentially, without everyone in it knowing that their disclosures are being permanently cataloged.

Those are not identical behaviors.

Research into the so-called salary taboo helps explain why. Economists Zoë Cullen and Ricardo Perez-Truglia conducted a field experiment involving 755 employees and found substantial reluctance both to reveal salaries to coworkers and to ask coworkers about their salaries. Their research suggests privacy norms themselves create significant barriers to the movement of salary information.

Transparency works best when people retain agency over their own information. An employee can strongly support salary ranges, pay-equity audits and open discussions while simultaneously deciding, "I don't want to tell you my exact salary." Those positions are not contradictory.

The emerging workplace challenge, therefore, is not whether compensation should be discussed. It is whether transparency remains consensual, relevant and contextual.

The Comparison Problem: Not Every Paycheck Is Comparable

There is another danger in informal salary investigations: compensation numbers can look remarkably simple while representing completely different economic arrangements.

Suppose an employee learns that a colleague earns $30 an hour while a contractor receives the equivalent of $55 an hour. At first glance, the contractor appears dramatically better compensated. But the comparison may be meaningless without understanding taxes, benefits, paid leave, insurance, retirement contributions, working hours, contract duration, specialized expertise and business expenses.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics illustrates the scale of the problem. In June 2026, private-sector employers spent an average of $46.89 per employee hour on total compensation. Wages and salaries accounted for $32.82, or 70% of the total, while benefits added another $14.07 per hour, representing 30% of compensation. Across civilian workers, benefits averaged $15.61 per hour.

That means comparing salary alone can omit nearly one-third of what an employer is spending to compensate a typical private-sector worker. Benefits include paid leave, health insurance, retirement and savings contributions, legally required benefits and supplemental compensation. The value also varies considerably across employers, occupations and employment arrangements.

Independent contractors create an even more complicated comparison. The Internal Revenue Service generally treats independent contractors as self-employed, and their earnings are subject to self-employment tax. Unlike employees, contractors can also be responsible for their own business expenses, estimated taxes and benefits. Employees, by contrast, generally receive W-2 compensation with payroll withholding, while employers have their own employment-tax obligations.

A $70-an-hour contractor therefore does not automatically earn the economic equivalent of a $145,600 salaried employee simply because multiplying $70 by 40 hours and 52 weeks produces that number. The contractor may work fewer billable hours, receive no paid vacation, purchase independent insurance, fund retirement independently and absorb business overhead that an employee never sees.

Salary transparency without compensation literacy can consequently produce as much confusion as clarity.

Job Level Matters, Too

The same problem emerges when workers compare compensation across dramatically different levels of responsibility.

Knowing what colleagues performing substantially similar work earn can provide a meaningful benchmark. Comparing a part-time coordinator's hourly rate with the salary of a vice president overseeing a multimillion-dollar operation tells considerably less unless the comparison incorporates responsibility, experience, revenue accountability, supervisory scope, specialized skills, performance incentives and total compensation.

Economist Zoë Cullen's review of pay-transparency research makes an important distinction between horizontal transparency, which reveals compensation among similarly situated coworkers, and vertical transparency, which reveals differences across levels of seniority. Research suggests these forms of transparency can produce different behavioral and economic effects. Transparency among comparable workers can expose wage differences, while vertical information can shape employees' understanding of potential earnings and career advancement.

This distinction is frequently lost when workplace salary conversations become nothing more than a collection of numbers.

A $45,000 employee, an $85,000 manager, a $150,000 executive and a contractor billing $100 an hour may all be fairly compensated, unfairly compensated or somewhere in between. Their raw numbers alone cannot answer the question. Compensation must be evaluated against the work being purchased.

Employees Have a Right to Discuss Their Wages

There is also an important legal line that employers should understand.

The National Labor Relations Board states that employees covered by the National Labor Relations Act have the right to communicate with other employees about their wages. Employees may discuss wages and benefits, work together regarding workplace conditions and engage in certain concerted activity aimed at improving those conditions. Employers generally cannot discharge, discipline, threaten or coercively question covered employees for protected concerted activity.

That protection is fundamental to understanding this debate. An employer should not confuse discomfort about salary conversations with authority to simply prohibit them. Workplace policies that broadly attempt to silence lawful wage discussions can create legal problems.

At the same time, a legal right to discuss compensation does not require every colleague to participate in the conversation. The right to say, "I make $75,000" coexists with another person's ability to say, "I'd rather not discuss my salary." The healthier cultural norm is not compulsory disclosure. It is voluntary disclosure without retaliation or coercion.

Pay Transparency Is Becoming an Employer Responsibility

The long-term solution may be for companies to provide better compensation information so employees do not feel compelled to build their own underground salary intelligence networks.

That transition is already underway. SHRM reported that a 2024 WTW survey found 75% of organizations were communicating hiring rates or salary ranges to external candidates, while 69% were doing so for internal candidates. Employers were also increasingly explaining job levels, with 74% communicating information about levels and 65% providing information about how individual base pay is determined.

That represents a more sophisticated version of transparency than simply publishing salaries. Employees need to understand not only what a job pays but why it pays what it pays.

A well-designed compensation system can explain salary bands, job grades, geographic adjustments, promotion criteria, bonus eligibility, commission structures and the factors that determine where an employee sits within a range. It can also explain the difference between base salary and total compensation.

That information gives workers something more useful than gossip: context.

The Hidden Risk of Transparency Without Context

There is an uncomfortable reality for employers. Once compensation information starts circulating, unexplained differences become management problems whether those differences are justified or not.

An employee who discovers that a colleague earns $12,000 more may assume discrimination, favoritism or poor negotiation created the difference. Perhaps that is true. But the difference might also reflect ten additional years of experience, scarce technical credentials, geographic adjustments, expanded responsibilities, a counteroffer during a tight labor market or performance differences.

The employee does not know unless the organization can explain its compensation philosophy.

This is where badly managed transparency can damage trust. The problem is not necessarily that employees know too much. Sometimes it is that they know just enough to see a difference but not enough to understand it.

Research on pay transparency also shows that disclosure is not an unqualified economic good in every setting. Cullen's review of the research found evidence that transparency can narrow coworker wage differences but may also contribute to pay compression and change employer bargaining behavior. Earlier research examining California's public disclosure of municipal salaries found that disclosure was associated with approximately a 7% decline in compensation among top managers and a substantial increase in their quit rate.

The lesson is not that organizations should retreat into secrecy. It is that compensation transparency is a management system, not merely the release of numbers.

A Better Model: Transparency Without Intrusion

The workplace of the future will almost certainly contain more compensation information than the workplace of the past. Salary ranges will become increasingly visible, employees will continue comparing compensation, and younger generations are unlikely to resurrect the old rule that discussing money is impolite.

That can be healthy.

But mature pay transparency requires boundaries. Employees should be free to discuss their compensation and compare experiences. Colleagues should be equally free to decline. Workers seeking benchmarks should focus primarily on comparable positions and total compensation rather than treating every paycheck in an organization as interchangeable. Managers should avoid retaliating against lawful salary conversations, while organizations should proactively explain compensation structures before information gaps turn into distrust.

Most importantly, companies should recognize what the transparency movement is really telling them. When employees feel they must privately investigate dozens of coworkers to determine whether they are being paid fairly, the organization may have an information problem of its own.

The strongest companies will not solve that problem by returning to secrecy. They will solve it by replacing mystery with structure: credible salary bands, consistent job levels, documented promotion standards, understandable total-compensation statements and clear explanations of how pay decisions are made.

The future of compensation is likely to be more transparent. But transparency should illuminate systems, not erase personal boundaries.

Employees deserve enough information to determine whether they are being compensated fairly. They do not automatically need unrestricted access to the personal financial information of everyone around them to accomplish that goal. In the new workplace, the most sustainable principle may be straightforward: make the system transparent while allowing the individual to remain private.

Sources

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• Bankrate. (2022). Younger workers aren't keeping their salaries a secret anymore.

• Bennedsen, M., Simintzi, E., Tsoutsoura, M., & Wolfenzon, D. (2022). Do firms respond to gender pay gap transparency? The Journal of Finance, 77(4), 2051–2091.

• Cullen, Z. B. (2024). Is pay transparency good? Journal of Economic Perspectives, 38(1), 153–180.

• Cullen, Z. B., & Perez-Truglia, R. (2023). The salary taboo: Privacy norms and the diffusion of information. Journal of Public Economics, 222.

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• National Labor Relations Board. (2026). Concerted activity. United States Government.

• National Labor Relations Board. (2026). Your right to discuss wages. United States Government.

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• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2026). Employer costs for employee compensation—June 2026. U.S. Department of Labor.

• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2026). Median weekly earnings were $1,204 in 2025. U.S. Department of Labor.

• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2026). Usual weekly earnings of wage and salary workers: 2025. U.S. Department of Labor.