France Won't Tell You What Anyone Earns. Australia Passed a Law So You'd Have to Ask.

🇫🇷 France · 🇦🇺 Australia

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In France, asking a colleague their salary is roughly the social equivalent of asking about their therapy bills. In Australia, since December 2022, it is a legally protected act that your employer cannot punish you for — and yet, according to SEEK's own listings data, two out of three Australian job ads still won't tell you the number before you apply. One country has made secrecy a matter of etiquette; the other has made openness a matter of law and left the culture to catch up. Neither has quite solved the problem of getting paid what you're worth, which is, after all, the only part that matters to the person filling out the visa paperwork.

🇫🇷 France

🇦🇺 Australia

[SECTION: France]

France's relationship with the payslip is best understood through Hofstede Insights' cultural scoring: France sits at 68 on power distance against Australia's 36, meaning hierarchy and its discretions are simply more accepted as the natural order of things. Salary has traditionally been something management knows and employees don't compare — Connexion France reported that discussing what you earn with a colleague remains taboo enough that most French workers simply don't, a habit now being tested by a 2026 EU directive requiring firms of 250+ employees to move toward "total transparency" on pay. France's own Index de l'égalité professionnelle, the five-indicator gender pay compliance tool companies have filed for years, is being replaced by a broader seven-indicator regime under EU Directive 2023/970, with salary ranges required in job postings — internal and external — once the implementing law clears parliament.

Until then, the entretien annuel remains the one culturally sanctioned venue for a raise conversation, typically held between November and February, where employees are expected to arrive with a case built on expanded responsibilities or documented wins rather than a bare demand. According to the OECD, France's average annual wage sits at roughly $60,608, and the minimum wage (SMIC) is set nationally and revised each year — useful anchors in a system where the job ad itself will rarely tell you anything.

[SECTION: Australia]

Australia inverts the French model almost point for point. The Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Secure Jobs, Better Pay) Act 2022 banned pay-secrecy clauses outright: as of December 2022, employees have a legal right to disclose or ask about pay, and since June 2023 employers who write secrecy provisions into new contracts risk penalties of up to $66,600 per breach. This tracks with Hofstede's individualism score of 90 for Australia against France's 71 — one of the highest in the world, reflecting a culture where self-advocacy is expected rather than suspected. The Workplace Gender Equality Agency now compels every employer with 100 or more staff to report its gender pay gap publicly, and as of its most recent figures the national average total remuneration gap sits at 21.8 percent — a number now sitting in the open where anyone can look it up.

And yet the law has outpaced the habit. SEEK's own listings data, reported via SBS News, found only about 34.5 percent of Australian job ads include a salary range, meaning the right to ask coexists with an ongoing willingness by employers not to tell. According to the OECD, Australian average annual wages run higher than France's at roughly $70,736 — but that figure arrives without the French system's forced annual reckoning; negotiation in Australia is expected to happen at hiring and largely nowhere else unless you make it happen yourself.

[SECTION: The Reckoning]

Here is the genuinely counterintuitive part: the country that legally protects your right to talk about money (Australia) still mostly won't put a number in the ad, while the country where discussing money is a cultural violation (France) is about to be legally forced to publish salary bands before Australia gets around to doing it voluntarily. Law and culture are moving in opposite directions in each country, just from different starting points — Australia legislated the permission and is waiting on the habit; France is about to legislate the habit onto a culture that never wanted the permission in the first place.

The practical upshot for a newcomer is almost a role reversal of expectations. In Australia, you'll be the one expected to ask, negotiate, and compare notes with the person two desks over — silence reads as a lack of confidence, not tact. In France, initiative outside the entretien annuel can read as a breach of form, and your leverage comes less from confrontation than from timing and documentation. Bring the same American-style "always be negotiating" energy to both, and France will find you presumptuous while Australia will find you strangely passive.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — One thread on a Paris startup job offer counselled against being the first to name a number: whoever states their expected salary first typically ends up in the weaker negotiating position, since French hiring managers rarely lead with their real ceiling either.

Quora — A user comparing offers noted that 60,000 euros gross a year sounds respectable in France until you account for deductions of 35 to 45 percent, landing closer to 35,000 euros in hand — a gap that surprises people who priced the move using the gross figure alone.

Blind (teamblind.com) — Tech workers swapping negotiation tactics advised padding a stated expectation by roughly 20 percent above the true minimum and using levels.fyi-style comps as leverage — advice built for a US-style counteroffer culture that lands oddly in France's single annual review window, where that kind of number-first posturing can read as a mismatch rather than confidence.

Average Joe Down Under (expat blog) — An expat weighing an Australian relocation offer described discovering that headline salary numbers mean little without factoring outer-suburb rent and transport costs against inner-city ones, since two job offers with similar pay can translate into very different livable outcomes depending on where in the city they land you.

Quora — Someone weighing a Melbourne offer of roughly AUD 115,000 against an existing 25 lakh package in India was advised that the number alone doesn't answer the question — the honest comparison has to include superannuation, tax brackets, and whether the new city's cost of living quietly eats the raise.

Conclusion

If you're choosing between the two on the strength of their pay culture alone, the honest answer is that neither country hands you a fair number for free — France makes you wait for the right calendar date and arrive with a dossier, while Australia makes you do the asking yourself, repeatedly, into a silence the law has legalised but not yet dissolved. What both systems reward, in the end, is the same unglamorous thing: research done before you sit down, whether that's a convention collective salary grid or a SEEK benchmark printout.

The thing I'd tell a friend over a drink is this — in France, learn the calendar and build the dossier; in Australia, open your mouth and ask the person next to you, because as of a few years ago, it's finally, officially, none of your employer's business if you do.