In Germany, Asking Your Coworker's Salary Is Rude. In Korea, Your Paycheck Is Basically Public Knowledge — By Design.
Priya MehtaJuly 21, 2026 7 min read
🇩🇪 Germany · 🇰🇷 South Korea
By Priya Mehta, The Global Office
For decades, German employment contracts have quietly included pay secrecy clauses — often unenforceable, but culturally binding all the same. South Korean companies, by contrast, have run large swaths of the workforce on "hobongje," a seniority-based pay scale so codified that a colleague's salary is often derivable from their hire date and title alone, no awkward conversation required. Germany is finally being forced into transparency by EU law. Korea has been transparent about pay for forty years — it just never needed to negotiate to get there.
Do's & Don'ts
🇩🇪 Germany
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Negotiate hard before signing — starting salary has historically depended heavily on individual negotiation, not fixed bands | Assume your offer reflects a transparent, standardized pay scale — until the 2026 EU directive lands fully, discretion still rules in many firms |
| Use your legal right, in companies with 200+ employees, to request comparable pay data under the Entgelttransparenzgesetz | Ask a coworker directly what they earn — it remains a strong social taboo even where it's now legally discussable |
| Research market rate independently before any salary conversation — public salary calculators and industry surveys are trusted references | Expect your manager to volunteer pay band information unprompted, even post-reform |
| Read job postings for the newly required salary ranges — they're becoming mandatory under incoming EU rules | Assume every employer is already compliant — enforcement and disclosure habits are still catching up to the law |
| Keep negotiation direct and fact-based — German colleagues respect a well-argued case more than a charming one | Try to negotiate through flattery or vague appeals — it reads as evasive in a culture that prizes blunt honesty |
🇰🇷 South Korea
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Understand your pay is tied to tenure and title before you accept an offer — hobongje still governs roughly 55 percent of large companies | Expect performance alone to move your pay significantly in a hobongje-structured firm — tenure usually outweighs output |
| Negotiate hardest on housing and severance, not base salary — Jeonse-style housing benefits can be worth more than a marginal salary bump | Ignore housing perks in an offer — some firms offer effectively rent-free housing in Seoul, a bigger lever than base pay |
| Expect your title (and the honorific that comes with it) to functionally announce your pay band to colleagues | Assume your foreign experience automatically commands a premium — it rarely does outside senior, name-brand hires |
| Ask directly about the salary structure during interviews — it's a legitimate, expected question, not a taboo one | Expect flexibility once hired — moving up the pay scale outside of promotion cycles is uncommon |
| Learn enough Korean to navigate HR conversations — pay discussions are rarely conducted comfortably in English | Assume a global tech offer letter translates directly — local firms often benchmark differently than multinational subsidiaries |
Germany: Legislating Away a Culture of Silence
Germany's relationship with salary information has long been defined by discretion. Employment contracts frequently carried pay secrecy language that, per legal analysis of the practice, was often unenforceable but nonetheless entrenched a culture where salary was a private, faintly embarrassing topic. The 2017 Entgelttransparenzgesetz gave employees at larger companies a legal right to request comparable pay information, but uptake and cultural change have been slow — negotiation has continued to hinge on the same informal levers it always did: prior salary, individual confidence, and manager discretion.
That is set to change more forcefully. The EU Pay Transparency Directive, due to be implemented into German law by June 2026, will require employers to disclose starting salary ranges to applicants — ideally in the job posting itself — and will ban pay secrecy agreements outright. For a country that scores 65 on Hofstede's uncertainty avoidance index, a structured, rules-based system replacing ad hoc discretion is, if anything, a more comfortable fit culturally than the negotiation-heavy status quo it's replacing.
South Korea: Transparent by Structure, Not by Conversation
South Korea solved pay transparency differently: not by requiring disclosure, but by making salary a predictable function of tenure. Under hobongje, wages climb automatically the longer an employee stays, an approach rooted in Confucian deference to seniority and, per labor ministry data, still used by 55 percent of large companies as of 2020, especially unionized ones. Korea has the highest wage compensation tied to tenure among OECD countries — meaning a colleague's rough salary can often be inferred from how long they've been there and what their title-honorific implies, no HR request required.
The Morning Brief
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The system is under real pressure. The Korea Times has reported growing resistance from younger workers who see seniority-based pay as disconnected from actual output, and government policy has begun nudging companies toward performance and role-based structures instead. But change is slow in a culture where, per Hofstede's individualism score of just 18 against Germany's 67, pay has traditionally been understood as a collective, structural fact rather than an individually negotiated outcome.
The Reckoning
The counterintuitive result: Germany, culturally comfortable with confrontation and blunt speech, has historically kept salary conversations the most private and the most individually negotiated. South Korea, culturally deferential and indirect in almost every other workplace interaction, has run the most transparent pay system of the two by simply removing the need to ask. Directness about pay and directness in general do not travel together here.
The second irony is regulatory direction. Germany is moving toward Korea's model — structured, disclosed, rule-bound — while Korea is being pushed toward Germany's old model of individually negotiated, performance-linked pay. Anyone timing a move to either country in the next two to three years should expect the system they read about in an expat guide to be mid-transition by the time they land.
The Part the Brochure Left Out
Blind (TeamBlind) — A software engineer who moved from a German firm to a Seoul subsidiary of a US company wrote that the strangest adjustment wasn't the hierarchy, it was realizing their exact salary band was effectively knowable to any colleague who knew their hire year and title — something that would have been a firing-offense conversation back in Germany.
r/germany — An expat who joined a Berlin startup described the culture shock of being told, informally, by a manager to "never discuss your salary with the team," despite Germany's 2017 transparency law technically giving them the right to request comparable pay data — the legal right existed, but nobody used it.
Quora — Someone who moved to Seoul from Frankfurt for a finance role noted that negotiating harder on housing than on base salary was the single best piece of advice they received, since a Jeonse-style housing allowance from their employer effectively doubled their real compensation without touching the headline number.
Internations Seoul — A German expat manager observed that asking a Korean colleague directly "how is pay structured here" during onboarding was welcomed as a sensible, practical question, in sharp contrast to Germany, where the same directness aimed at a peer's actual number would have been a serious faux pas.
r/germany — A returning German professional who'd spent four years in Seoul said the hardest readjustment back home was the sudden reintroduction of salary secrecy — after years of an transparent, tenure-based system, the German norm of not knowing what anyone on the team earned felt, in their words, "deliberately inefficient."
Conclusion
If you're moving from Germany to South Korea, the practical shift is from individual negotiation to structural acceptance — your pay will largely be determined by tenure and title before you ever sit down to talk numbers, so put your negotiating energy into housing and signing perks instead. If you're moving from Korea to Germany, prepare for the opposite: nobody will tell you what anyone else earns, the law is only just catching up to changing that, and your starting number is still substantially yours to fight for.
The honest version, over a drink: in Korea, ask about the system before you ask about the number. In Germany, do your homework before you ask for anything at all — because for a little while longer, nobody there is going to volunteer it for you.
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Photo by Vlada Karpovich via Pexels
Priya Mehta
Staff writer covering financial markets and corporate strategy. Has strong opinions about spreadsheets.