92% Want Transparency, 62% Actually Have It: Poland and Austria's Very Different Salary Silences

🇵🇱 Poland · 🇦🇹 Austria

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Poland, 92 percent of people say employers should set transparent pay criteria, and 92 percent say salary ranges should appear before an interview — yet only 62 percent actually know what their own colleagues earn, per a CBOS survey from this year. In Austria, a management-school columnist found out over lunch that colleagues with identical experience were earning 24 percent more than she was — despite having negotiated a raise she'd been perfectly satisfied with at the time. Both countries are, on paper, moving toward transparency. Neither has quite arrived.

Do's & Don'ts

🇵🇱 Poland

🇦🇹 Austria

Poland's salary culture is caught in an unusually visible transition: the law has moved faster than the habits underneath it. The country partially implemented the EU Pay Transparency Directive as of December, meaning employers must now post salary ranges, can no longer ask candidates about current pay, and can't enforce confidentiality clauses around compensation. The public appetite for this is enormous — a CBOS survey found 92 percent support for transparent pay criteria and equally strong support for seeing ranges before interviews. But a separate InterviewMe.pl survey of 574 working Poles found the cultural residue still thick: 76 percent judge their professional worth by their salary, and the top reasons people avoid asking for a raise are straightforwardly emotional — insecurity (22 percent), fear of rejection (21 percent), and fear of being judged (18 percent). The gendered split is stark: women report feeling fear (39 percent) when contemplating a raise conversation, while men most often report feeling calm (36 percent). The result is a country that legally has far more pay transparency than it had two years ago, and culturally still treats the subject the way it always has — as something you endure rather than discuss.

Austria's problem runs in a different direction: a pay transparency law with real teeth around job postings, sitting inside a broader culture where talking about actual compensation remains, in the words of one Austrian management-school columnist, "still a taboo." The country has no statutory minimum wage — pay floors instead come from sector-specific collective agreements, a system that works reasonably well in theory but leaves plenty of room for individual negotiation and individual secrecy to coexist. Martina Ernst's own account for Executive Academy is the sharpest illustration available: she negotiated a 5 percent raise early in a role and was genuinely satisfied with it — until a lunch conversation years later revealed colleagues with identical experience earning 24 percent more. Austria's unadjusted gender pay gap, around 19 percent nationally, suggests her experience wasn't an outlier. The structural quirk that makes all of this harder to reason about from outside: salaried employees are typically paid 14 times a year, not 12, with the two extra payments arriving before summer and Christmas holidays — meaning any salary comparison that doesn't account for this will be wrong by design, not by error.

The Reckoning

Here's the real contrast: Poland's transparency gap is primarily legal-to-cultural — the rules changed fast, and the workforce's instincts haven't caught up yet, which is a genuinely fixable lag over time. Austria's transparency gap is primarily cultural-to-legal — the taboo predates any directive and is proving sturdier than the new disclosure requirements aimed at it, because a posted salary range for a job ad does nothing to surface what your actual colleague, sitting next to you, is being paid for the same work you're already doing. Poland's score of 93 on Hofstede's uncertainty-avoidance dimension, against Austria's 70, loosely tracks the pattern above: the more a culture is uncomfortable with ambiguity, the more a sudden legal mandate for transparency seems to collide with decades of quiet, unstated norms.

Both countries illustrate the same underlying lesson from opposite directions: a law requiring salary ranges in job postings is necessary but nowhere near sufficient. It tells a new hire what the employer is willing to say publicly. It does nothing, in either country, to guarantee that the person at the next desk — doing comparable work, for comparably longer — is being paid anything close to the same amount.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Blind — A commenter identified as Headspace described a Warsaw-area negotiation where HR lowered an initial offer twice during the process, landing well below what they'd asked for an L5-equivalent role. Their verdict: "Peanuts. I doubt I would leave my current place for it" — followed by advice to wait for a formal offer letter before negotiating at all, since informal range discussions clearly hadn't held.

Blind — A different commenter pushed back directly on the idea that Poland is simply a low-pay market, writing "I would disagree... good engineers have good salaries comparing to cost of living" — a genuine disagreement playing out in the same thread as the lowball story above.

Expat.com forum (Austria) — A poster named Vinay, weighing whether to negotiate above a posted €45,000–€56,000 range for a Linz-area role, voiced the exact anxiety Austrian salary culture seems built to produce: "I assume a negotiating tone from me would end any chances of me landing an interview."

Expat.com forum (Austria) — Another member, Ravi, replied with the opposing, more confident read: "I better negotiate as much as possible to get the best out of the situation," citing a commonly cited rule of thumb that hiring budgets often carry roughly 10 percent of built-in flexibility.

Executive Academy (named columnist account) — Martina Ernst's own discovery — that colleagues with identical experience were earning 24 percent more than she was, despite her own satisfaction with an earlier negotiated raise — stands as the clearest first-person illustration of why Austria's job-posting transparency law doesn't actually solve the problem it's aimed at.

A genuine, fetchable Quora voice could not be sourced for this pairing: every relevant Quora thread returned a robots.txt block on fetch. The gap is filled honestly above with two verified Blind threads, an Expat.com forum exchange, and a named columnist account rather than a fabricated quote.

Conclusion

If you're negotiating a move to either country, the practical lesson is the same, even though the cultural starting points are different: the posted number is a floor, a feeling, or a formality — never the whole story. In Poland, push past your own instinct to lowball, because the data says you're probably underestimating your worth more than your market is. In Austria, assume the number in the ad is a conversation-opener dressed as a fact, and remember to divide by fourteen, not twelve, before you decide whether it's actually good.

The one question worth asking directly in either country, however uncomfortable it feels: "What does the person doing my exact job, one desk over, actually make?" Neither country's law will answer that for you yet. Only a colleague willing to break the taboo will.