Ireland vs. Vietnam: One Is Being Legally Forced to Tell You the Number, the Other Would Rather You Guessed

🇮🇪 Ireland · 🇻🇳 Vietnam

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

As of March 2026, only 39% of Irish job postings actually list a salary — up a modest 3 points on the year before — even though the country is legally required to start disclosing pay ranges on every job ad once the EU Pay Transparency Directive is transposed into Irish law. Vietnam, with no comparable directive forcing the issue, already beats that number handily: 71.5% of Vietnamese job postings specify a salary range outright, leaving the rest simply marked "negotiable." One country is being dragged toward transparency by Brussels; the other appears to have gotten there largely on its own.

Do's & Don'ts

🇮🇪 Ireland

🇻🇳 Vietnam

Ireland

Ireland's transparency story is being written almost entirely by external pressure. The EU Pay Transparency Directive (2023/970) sets binding minimum standards: salary ranges must appear in job ads, employers can no longer ask about salary history, and employees gain a formal right to know both their own pay level and the average pay for comparable roles, broken down by gender. Ireland was due to transpose the directive by 7 June 2026 but has confirmed it will miss that deadline, rolling out implementation in phases instead — reporting thresholds start at 250+ employees from 2027 and won't reach 100+ employee companies until 2031.

In the meantime, Ireland's actual market behaviour lags visibly behind the legislative intent: just 39% of job postings disclose salary as of early 2026. The country's headline gender pay gap, at 9.6%, sits comfortably below the EU average of 12.7% — a genuinely good number — but it's also the kind of aggregate figure that tends to mask sharper gaps once you break it down by seniority, the exact granularity the new directive is specifically designed to expose.

Vietnam

Vietnam has no equivalent directive forcing employers' hands, and yet the market already looks more transparent by one obvious measure: nearly three-quarters of job listings state a real salary figure rather than leaving it to negotiation. Monthly pay ranges documented across the market run from roughly 4.36 million to 76.9 million VND (about USD 166 to 2,930), varying enormously by industry, seniority, and whether the employer is domestic or foreign-owned; foreign companies operating in Vietnam typically negotiate compensation individually with candidates, constrained only by the statutory minimum wage floor.

The catch is that Vietnam's culture doesn't necessarily reward individual negotiating assertiveness the way transparent numbers might suggest. Hofstede Insights scores Vietnam at 70 on Power Distance — hierarchy and rank are broadly accepted — and just 20 on Individualism, among the more collectivist profiles globally, meaning group harmony and deference to established structure generally outweigh individual push-back, including in pay discussions. Advice commonly given to incoming professionals is to ask HR directly for the position's salary band rather than naming a figure first, letting the employer's stated range do the anchoring.

The Reckoning

The paradox here is that Vietnam, without any legal mandate, already publishes more salary information than Ireland does on the eve of binding EU legislation. But posted numbers and negotiating power aren't the same thing: Ireland's incoming rules are specifically engineered to strengthen an individual employee's hand — banning salary-history questions, guaranteeing access to comparative pay data — while Vietnam's transparent job ads exist within a much more hierarchical, employer-anchored negotiating culture where the number on the posting is closer to a starting point set by the company than a floor an employee is expected to push against.

In other words: Ireland is legislating individual leverage into a market that currently hides the number; Vietnam already shows the number but expects you to accept, more or less, what you're offered.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Blind — In a thread on whether people openly discuss salary with coworkers, one commenter described sharing freely with friends and family but noted a striking cultural pattern in the replies: several colleagues from more collectivist cultural backgrounds said they'd never felt discomfort discussing pay, while others raised in Western households described it as something their own parents treated as deeply taboo — suggesting the "salary secrecy" reflex is more culturally inherited than universal.

Blind — A separate commenter in the same discussion admitted they avoided discussing salary with coworkers specifically out of fear of retaliation, despite acknowledging that such discussions are legally protected in many jurisdictions — illustrating the gap between what the law technically allows and what employees actually feel safe doing.

Expat.com (Vietnam forum) — An expat thread on negotiating salary in Vietnam advised newcomers to ask the HR director directly for the position's stated range before revealing their own number, describing this as the standard, expected sequence in HCMC hiring rather than an aggressive move.

Quora — Responding to a question on negotiating an 11% pay raise after strong performance, one commenter framed the core tension bluntly: employers rarely volunteer a raise proactively regardless of performance, and the employee bears full responsibility for building the case and initiating the conversation — a dynamic that applies as much in transparency-forward markets as opaque ones.

Conclusion

If you're negotiating in Ireland over the next few years, treat the incoming rules as a genuine shift in leverage — ask for the range, ask for the comparative data once it's available, and don't volunteer your salary history out of old habit. If you're negotiating in Vietnam, the posted number is real, but so is the expectation that you'll work within the hierarchy that set it — ask for the band, don't anchor first, and read the room before you push. The honest version for a friend: Ireland is handing you a legal script it hasn't finished writing yet; Vietnam already gave you the number, just not necessarily the power to change it.