One Country Legislated Openness, the Other Legislated Loyalty: Salary Culture in South Korea vs. the Netherlands

🇰🇷 South Korea · 🇳🇱 Netherlands

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

The Netherlands is bracing for a law, delayed to January 2027, that will force employers to publish salary ranges and disclose the objective criteria behind every raise. South Korea, meanwhile, still runs much of its pay structure on tenure: the seniority-based system means two people doing identical work can be paid very differently depending on how long they've sat in the building, and the wage gap it produces is most pronounced among workers in their fifties, where men out-earn women by up to 2.5 million won a month. One country is legislating its way toward transparency; the other built its opacity into the pay scale itself.

Do's & Don'ts

🇰🇷 South Korea

🇳🇱 Netherlands

South Korea's pay structure is a legacy system straining against a modernizing labor market. The seniority-based model rewards tenure over output by design, and Korean professionals, per compensation research, now explicitly expect transparent salary offers and clear performance incentives rather than vague growth promises — a sign the old model is losing trust even where it's still technically the norm. Minimum wage sits at 10,030 won per hour for 2026, but the real spread is enormous: national averages pulled upward by the four major chaebol groups mask a mid-tier SME reality closer to 3.2–3.5 million won monthly. Negotiation, where it happens, tends to be less about back-and-forth haggling and more about accepting or declining a structured offer — foreign hires researching Korean compensation specifically note that housing benefits, like the jeonse semi-homeownership arrangement offered by employers such as Samsung and Coupang, often matter more to total value than the base number itself.

The Netherlands is moving the opposite direction by law. The EU Pay Transparency Directive, now set to take effect for Dutch employers on January 1, 2027 after a delay from its original mid-2026 date, will require job postings to include a salary range and give employees access to the objective, gender-neutral criteria behind pay decisions and promotions — a direct legislative assault on exactly the kind of tenure-based opacity that defines the Korean system. It's not solving everything: Statistics Netherlands still measured a 10.5% average pay gap in 2025, above the EU average. But much of Dutch pay is already shaped by collective labour agreements (CAOs) negotiated years in advance across entire sectors, meaning many employees know exactly what their raises will look like before they happen — a structural transparency Korea's seniority system approximates in spirit but not in actual disclosure.

The Reckoning: Korea's opacity is cultural and structural — pay is often genuinely private, tenure does real work in setting it, and negotiation happens more through benefits than through open haggling over base salary. The Netherlands' emerging transparency is legislative and top-down — the state is forcing employers to show their work, on a timeline, whether or not Dutch corporate culture was fully ready for it. Both systems produce persistent gender pay gaps despite their very different mechanisms, which is the detail worth sitting with: neither pure opacity nor mandated openness has, on its own, closed the gap — Korea's tenure system entrenches it structurally, while the Netherlands' still-unenforced directive hasn't yet had the chance to prove it can undo what CAOs and informal norms already baked in.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

teamblind.com — In a thread on negotiating with Korean employers from a U.S. baseline, posters said the salary gap made a genuine back-and-forth negotiation difficult, and recommended asking specifically about housing benefits, noting that jeonse-style arrangements offered by major employers like Samsung and Coupang could let a foreign hire live in Seoul essentially rent-free — often a bigger lever than the base salary number itself.

teamblind.com — Research the platform published on its own user data found that over 60% of tech workers report being told, formally or informally, not to discuss salary with coworkers — a norm posters said made it especially hard to know whether a Korean offer was actually competitive without outside benchmarking.

teamblind.com — A poster comparing a job offer from India to a Netherlands-based role described being pleasantly surprised at how directly the employer discussed the salary range and the reasoning behind it during the interview itself, calling it a sharp contrast to the more guarded compensation conversations they were used to elsewhere.

Quora — Someone advising on Dutch salary negotiation recommended gathering three to five comparable market offers before pushing back on a number, and specifically flagged the 30% ruling — a tax benefit for incoming skilled migrants — as something candidates regularly forget to raise during their own negotiation, leaving real money on the table.

Conclusion

If you're negotiating a Korean offer, spend less energy trying to move the base number and more energy understanding the full package — housing, tenure track, bonus structure — because that's where the actual room to negotiate tends to live. If you're negotiating a Dutch offer, come with market data and ask directly about both the CAO that governs your role and the 30% ruling if you qualify, because Dutch directness rewards candidates who match it. Priya's honest take: Korea will eventually tell you what you're worth once you've earned tenure to prove it, and the Netherlands is trying to pass a law forcing employers to tell you upfront — bet on whichever timeline you're more patient for.