Is sharing pay information a good idea? What happens when companies share more about how they pay their people?
So-called pay transparency refers to company policies that encourage the sharing of compensation-related information, such as salary ranges, pay scales, and compensation structures. This information may be supplied to current employees, job candidates, or the public. If current trends continue, by 2026, about half of U.S. employees will work for companies that practice some degree of pay transparency.
It seems that greater pay transparency would reduce unfair or discriminatory compensation policies, and there is some evidence that it helps. But the Harvard Business Review article “The Complicated Effects of Pay Transparency” lists a set of potential downsides of increased pay transparency that research has revealed. For example, pay transparency can lower employees’ relative bargaining power and can detach pay from performance, leading to potential consequences for productivity and turnover. Furthermore, when pay transparency reveals unfair compensation decisions, employee morale declines.
How has pay transparency affected the UX profession? We have some data from the 2024 UXPA salary survey to help us assess UX practitioners’ attitudes toward pay transparency.
The 2024 UXPA Salary Survey
In 2024, we continue a decades-long tradition by partnering with the UXPA to collect and understand the UX profession’s compensation, skills, and composition.
The survey data came from respondents recruited through postings on professional networks and websites such as UXPA and LinkedIn. Additional respondents were recruited through snowball sampling. The survey ran from April through October 2024, and the final sample size was 444 respondents from around the world (67% from the U.S., 4% from the UK, 4% from Canada, and smaller percentages from 34 other countries). Most respondents reported being User Researchers (64%) and User Experience Designers (31%).
The core salary questions in the survey remain consistent across administrations, but each survey also includes a set of custom items. In the 2024 survey, those custom items, shown in Figure 1, included three on the topic of pay transparency to estimate the range of pay transparency, satisfaction with pay transparency, and satisfaction with the fairness of compensation decisions (n = 383 who responded to these questions).
Figure 1: The pay transparency items from the 2024 UXPA salary survey (created on the MUiQ® platform).
Pay Transparency Scope
Table 1 shows the percentages of responses to the select-all-that-apply question about different types of pay transparency.
| Scope of Pay Transparency | % |
|---|---|
| Key executives | 6% |
| Anyone in my company | 7% |
| Anyone on my team | 10% |
| New job postings | 24% |
| None of these | 49% |
Table 1: Scope of UX practitioners’ pay transparency.
Roughly half (51%) of respondents reported working for a company with at least some pay transparency (consistent with published estimates for all U.S. employees), with the most common category being new job postings (24%).
Low Satisfaction with Pay Transparency and Pay Decisions
We next analyzed the responses to the two questions that asked respondents about their satisfaction with pay transparency and compensation decisions. As shown in Figure 2, ratings were low for satisfaction with pay transparency and fairness of compensation decisions, with both failing to pass the midpoint of the scale—3.9 for satisfaction with pay transparency and 4.7 for satisfaction that compensation decisions are fair.
Figure 2: UX practitioners’ satisfaction with pay transparency and fairness.
To dig deeper into how job transparency might affect these satisfaction ratings, we split the sample between respondents who reported having some type of pay transparency and those who responded “None of these” on the select-all-that-apply item (Figure 3). Those who had some pay transparency had significantly higher satisfaction ratings than those who did not (Pay Transparency: t(381) = 7.0, p < .0001; Fair Compensation Decisions: t(381) = 4.5, p < .0001).
Figure 3: Satisfaction with pay transparency and fairness as a function of pay transparency scope.
Pay Transparency and Fairness Associated with Higher Job Satisfaction
Finally, we computed correlations between satisfaction with pay transparency, compensation fairness, and overall job satisfaction, with the results shown in Table 2.
| Correlation between | r | R2 | p |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pay Transparency and Fair Compensation | 0.704 | 50% | < .0001 |
| Pay Transparency and Job Satisfaction | 0.333 | 11% | < .0001 |
| Fair Compensation and Job Satisfaction | 0.438 | 23% | < .0001 |
Table 2: Correlations among pay transparency, compensation fairness, and overall job satisfaction.
For this set of satisfaction ratings, we found:
- Satisfaction with pay transparency accounted for 50% of the variation in satisfaction that compensation decisions are fair.
- Satisfaction with fair compensation decisions accounted for 23% of the variation in overall job satisfaction.
Note that in our analysis of what drives UX salary, we did not find that pay transparency had a measurable effect on driving higher or lower salaries. There are several potential reasons why this effect wasn’t significant in our regression modeling of UX salaries. It might not affect pay at all, it could be a small effect undetectable with our sample size, or it could be accounted for in other variables that competed with it in the regression model. This last possibility is especially intriguing because variation in pay transparency across U.S. regions, which were in the regression model, may have sufficiently accounted for any variation in salary driven by a more limited binary measure of no transparency versus some transparency (e.g., California has some of the strictest pay transparency laws in the U.S. and also has the highest UX salaries).
Summary
Using data from UX practitioners who answered the pay transparency question in the 2024 UXPA Salary Survey (n = 383, 67% U.S.-based), we examined how common pay transparency is within UX organizations and how it relates to satisfaction with compensation and overall job satisfaction. We found:
- About half of UX professionals report at least some level of pay transparency. This is consistent with projections that by 2026, half of U.S. employees will work for companies that have pay transparency policies.
- Satisfaction with pay transparency and fairness is low among UX practitioners. Mean satisfaction scores were below the midpoint for satisfaction with pay transparency and satisfaction that compensation decisions are fair, implying there is room for improvement in compensation communication and policies.
- Pay transparency is associated with higher job satisfaction scores. UX practitioners who reported having some pay transparency had significantly higher mean satisfaction scores for pay transparency and perceived fairness of compensation than those practitioners who reported no transparency.
- Fairness matters. Perceived fairness in pay decisions is more strongly associated with overall job satisfaction than pay transparency.
- Transparency doesn’t necessarily lead to higher pay. But pay transparency is likely linked to better morale and trust within organizations and reduced incidence of unfair pay disparity.
- Pay transparency needs to be carefully managed. The findings from the 2024 UXPA salary survey strongly suggest that there is plenty of room to improve job transparency in the companies that hire UX practitioners, but it is critical that pay transparency policies support rather than diminish the belief that compensation is fair.
