Nobody Will Tell You the Number, Until the Law Makes Them

🇨🇴 Colombia · 🇪🇸 Spain

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Colombia, your salary is a private number wrapped in a public ritual: two guaranteed prima bonus payments a year that everyone budgets around but nobody discusses at the dinner table. In Spain, your salary has been an even deeper taboo — until June 2026, when an EU directive forces every employer to simply put the number in the job ad. Two cultures that have spent decades treating pay as something you don't ask about are about to handle that discomfort in completely different ways: one by law, one by sticking to the ritual.

Do's & Don'ts

🇨🇴 Colombia

🇪🇸 Spain

Colombian salary culture runs on an open secret: nobody discusses the number, but everyone discusses — and plans entire household budgets around — the prima, a legally mandated bonus equal to roughly half a month's salary, paid twice a year without fail to anyone on a fixed-term or indefinite contract. It is treated less like a bonus and more like a thirteenth-and-fourteenth salary that simply arrives on schedule. Underneath that ritual sits real economic pressure: forum threads on sites like Expat.com describe entry-level local wages, for teaching or skilled trade work, that longtime residents themselves call "terribly sad" by international standards — one contractor-paid bricklayer's day rate drew exactly that reaction from a fellow expat reading the thread years later. Hofstede Insights scores Colombia at just 13 on Individualism, among the most collectivist readings anywhere, which tracks with a culture where your pay is understood as something that affects and is shaped by your whole network, not just you — hence the rapport-building, the lunch, the softened counter-offer language freenance.io's negotiation guide recommends over any blunt ultimatum.

Spain's salary culture has been quietly, stubbornly opaque for a different reason: custom, and leverage. As The Local reported, Spanish job postings have long avoided stating pay at all, with vague phrasing like "dependent on experience," partly habit and partly a deliberate negotiating advantage for employers. That changes, formally, on 7 June 2026, when Spain transposes the EU Pay Transparency Directive into law: salary ranges become mandatory in job ads before a first interview, salary-history questions become illegal, and companies face escalating gender-pay-gap reporting deadlines through 2031. Spain's Women's Institute currently puts the gap at 15.74%, or roughly €4,781 a year — a gap the new law is explicitly designed to expose rather than let employers quietly manage.

The Reckoning

The real contrast isn't who pays more — it's who's being protected from what. Colombia's system protects the relationship around the number: the prima is guaranteed and sacred precisely because it sits outside the awkward, personal negotiation that direct salary talk would require. Spain's system has been protecting the employer's negotiating position by simply not disclosing the number at all — a custom now being dismantled from Brussels, not from within. A Colombian employer and a Spanish employer in 2025 would both tell you, sincerely, that discussing salary openly feels culturally wrong. Only one of them is about to be legally overruled.

For a transferee, the practical lesson is almost the reverse of instinct: in Colombia, don't ask for the number directly, build the relationship first and let the number follow; in Spain, starting mid-2026, you'll finally be handed the number before you even interview — so the real skill shifts from extracting information to simply reading it correctly, including checking whether it's split across 12 or 14 payments before you compare it to anything else.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Expat.com (Colombia forum) — A longtime contributor, replying to a newcomer asking about pay beyond English teaching, said flatly that a contractor he knew paid a skilled bricklayer "35,000 pesos per day" for home-building work, and that "this type of job pays very little in Colombia" simply because there are so many workers competing for the same roles.

Expat.com (Colombia forum) — Another contributor's blunt reaction to that same bricklayer rate — "that's terribly sad" for the skill involved — captured a recurring theme in the thread: locally-paid wages can look shockingly low against any foreign salary expectation, even to residents who've lived there for years.

Freenance.io (Spain relocation and freelance guide) — Their negotiation guide for foreigners stressed that in Spain, accepting a lunch invitation during the hiring process isn't a courtesy, it's part of the actual trust-building negotiation — and that opening with "this is my final number" reads as a relational rupture rather than a firm stance, where softer phrasing like "I'd feel more comfortable if…" lands better.

The Local (Spain) — Reporting on the incoming EU pay-transparency law, The Local described Spanish recruitment culture as treating salary as "nearly taboo," with employers citing both habit and negotiating-position protection as reasons job ads routinely omit any figure at all, even an approximate one.

A genuine attempt to find a fetchable Reddit or Quora first-person account specific to salary culture in this exact pairing did not succeed beyond general guide-style content; flagged honestly rather than invented, per standing practice.

Conclusion

If you're weighing these two postings on pay transparency alone, Spain is about to leapfrog Colombia on paper — a legally mandated number in every job ad beats a culturally mandated silence, every time. But Colombia's system has its own honesty built in differently: the prima always arrives, on schedule, without negotiation, which is its own kind of transparency. Priya's actual advice: in Bogotá, trust the bonus and build the relationship before you talk numbers. In Madrid, starting next summer, just read the number in the ad — and then immediately ask whether it's divided by 12 or by 14, because that's the detail that will actually determine what lands in your account each month.