The State of Play Right Now
If you have spent any time job hunting in Finland, you already know the frustration. You find a role that looks right, the title fits, the location works, and then you scroll to the bottom of the listing and find nothing where a salary should be. No range, no indication, not even a vague bracket. This is not an anomaly in one sector. It is the default across virtually every field in Finland. Of the roughly 9,900 active Finnish listings tracked by jobcrawls.com over the last 30 days, nearly three in four contained no salary information at all. Only 28% showed any figure, and those were mostly hourly or monthly rates in healthcare and education, where public sector collective agreements make disclosure standard. The most striking figure is in Technology. Finland's highest-paying field discloses salary in fewer than one in five listings. If you are a software engineer, a data scientist, or a product manager looking for work in Finland right now, you are applying to roles with almost no idea of the pay on offer. That is the baseline the new law is changing.What the Law Actually Is
This is an EU law, not a purely Finnish one. The EU Pay Transparency Directive (Directive 2023/970) was adopted in 2023 and requires all 27 EU member states to bring it into national law by June 2026. Finland is on track to do so by 18 May 2026, roughly seven weeks from the date of this article. ↗ Read the full analysis of Finland's implementing legislation Finland's approach sticks closely to the minimum requirements of the directive. The government has not added extra obligations beyond what Brussels mandated, but the core requirements still represent a real shift for how hiring works here.What Actually Changes for You
The most important thing to understand is what the law does and does not require. Salary ranges do not have to appear in job advertisements. Finnish employers can still post a listing with no pay figure shown. The obligation kicks in during the recruitment process itself: before the first interview, or at the very latest before any salary negotiation begins, the employer must provide you with the salary or salary range for the role.
What this means in practice
You will likely still see many job ads with no salary listed. But once you are invited to interview, the employer is legally obligated to share the salary range with you before that conversation starts. You should not have to ask for it.
Your New Rights as an Employee
The law does not only affect the hiring process. Once employed, you gain a set of new rights around pay information.-
Annual right to pay comparison You can request written information on your own salary and the average salary of colleagues of the opposite gender doing equivalent work. Your employer must respond within two months.
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Protection from retaliation You cannot be penalised, dismissed, or treated negatively for requesting pay information, helping a colleague make such a request, or discussing your salary with others. These protections are explicit in the law.
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Pay gap reporting for larger employers Companies with 250 or more employees must calculate and publish gender pay gap data using 2026 figures, with the first report due by June 2027. Smaller companies follow on a phased timeline. Where a gap of 5% or more is identified and cannot be justified, the employer must take remedial action.
Worth noting
The law does not mean everyone at a company will earn the same salary. Employers can still set different pay levels based on skills, experience, and performance. What changes is that those differences must be based on objective, non-discriminatory criteria, and you have new tools to check whether your pay is in line with your peers.
What to Do Before and After May 2026
Whether you are actively job hunting now or already employed in Finland, the change is relevant to you in different ways.If you are job hunting now
You are still operating under the old rules. Salary information will not automatically appear in listings, and employers are not yet obligated to provide it before interviews. That said, the direction of travel is clear, and many larger Finnish employers are already moving toward greater transparency ahead of the deadline. Filtering jobcrawls.com by salary to find listings that do disclose figures will give you market context for your negotiations.If you are already employed in Finland
From 18 May, you can request pay comparison data annually. It is worth understanding your rights clearly before exercising them. You should not need to make any formal complaint to receive this information. A written request to HR is the standard route, and your employer has two months to respond in writing. If they do not, the enforcement mechanisms of the law apply.jobcrawls.com
jobcrawls.com already surfaces salary data on Finnish listings where it exists. Filter by field, city, seniority, and salary range to see what employers are paying today, and use that context before your next negotiation.
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