Two Ways to Never Know What Your Colleague Earns

🇨🇳 China · 🇪🇸 Spain

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Spain, your salary sits inside a legally mandated pay register a works council can, in theory, inspect. In China, your salary is negotiated over tea, in installments, across several weeks, without anyone raising their voice or naming a number they might regret. Both countries would tell you they are being transparent. Neither means it quite the way you'd expect.

🇨🇳 China

🇪🇸 Spain

China: The Number Nobody Says First

According to China's National Bureau of Statistics, the average annual wage in urban private units reached 71,590 yuan in 2025, against 129,441 yuan in non-private urban units — a gap wide enough to make "average salary" nearly meaningless before you've asked which city, sector, and employer type you mean. Middle- and senior-management wages, at just over 210,000 yuan, ran roughly three times production-worker wages, per the same release. Add foreign hires and the range widens further: expatriate professionals in tier-1 cities can out-earn local peers several times over, according to compensation trackers such as HiredChina, though that premium has been narrowing as the domestic talent pool professionalizes.

None of this gets discussed directly, at least not at first. Negotiation runs on the same social operating system as everything else in China — mianzi, or face — meaning a counteroffer delivered too bluntly risks embarrassing the person across the table, a worse outcome than simply not getting the raise. Hofstede Insights scores China at 80 on power distance and 20 on individualism, which explains why salary decisions move up a chain of approval rather than resting with the manager in front of you, and why negotiations proceed as an extended, relationship-first process rather than one decisive conversation. The South China Morning Post has documented the flip side of that patience: with youth unemployment persistently in double digits, provincial governments have raised minimum wages by double digits in a single year, meaning the wage conversation in China increasingly happens over the state's shoulder as much as across the table.

Spain: Transparent on Paper, Opaque in Practice

Spain has, on paper, one of Europe's more rigorous pay-transparency regimes. Royal Decree 902/2020 requires every company to maintain a registro retributivo — a pay register broken down by gender and job category — and firms with 50-plus employees must run a full remuneration audit. According to Mercer's 2025 Global Pay Transparency Report, employer readiness for the incoming EU Pay Transparency Directive, which tightens the unjustified-gap threshold from 25 percent to 5 percent when it takes effect in June 2026, has risen to nearly 50 percent globally, with Asia-Pacific employers among the least prepared and the Nordics furthest along.

What the register doesn't fix is the negotiation itself, which remains a slow, relationship-first ritual. Workplace etiquette guides warn that jumping straight to numbers before establishing rapport — sometimes called the "dos pulpos" mistake, after Spanish slang for someone who reaches for everything too fast — is the most common error foreigners make. Hofstede scores Spain at 86 on uncertainty avoidance, nearly triple China's 30, which tracks with a culture that prefers its compensation rules codified, its pay bands fixed by collective agreement, and its raises scheduled to a predictable Q1 window rather than sprung on anyone mid-year. The reward is legibility; the cost, as any newly arrived hire discovers when the offer letter meets the bank statement, is that Spain's average gross salary of roughly €31,600 a year gets substantially smaller once progressive social-security withholdings are through with it.

The Reckoning

Here is the irony: the country with a legally mandated, gender-disaggregated public pay register produces less individual negotiating leverage than the country with none. Spain's transparency is structural and collective — you can see the band, but it's often fixed by sector-wide agreement, leaving individual room in the low single digits. China's opacity is interpersonal — you can't see anyone else's number, but the negotiation is genuinely elastic, stretched over weeks precisely because nothing is fixed on paper until it is. Transparency, it turns out, is not the same thing as leverage, and secrecy is not the same thing as rigidity.

The other reversal is speed. China, culturally patient about the negotiation itself, moves fast on macro wages — double-digit minimum-wage increases across most provinces within a year, per the SCMP. Spain, procedurally transparent, moves slowly — one annual review window, a scale set by collective bargaining, a raise cycle measured in fiscal years. If you want your own compensation conversation to move quickly, you may have better luck in the system that never tells you what anyone else makes.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — a poster explained that expatriates assigned to China by multinational employers can often negotiate a full package worth two-and-a-half to three times their home-country salary once housing, transport, and medical coverage are folded in — a reminder that in China the real number is the bundle, not the base.

Expat.com forum — a long-term American resident warned that companies routinely fail to deliver the annual raises or bonuses implied during hiring, and that after watching the exchange rate move against him for years, he now negotiates a currency buffer into his contract up front rather than trusting future goodwill.

Expat.com forum — another contributor, who recruits foreign staff outside China's top-tier cities, noted that salary benchmarks people find online almost always describe Beijing or Shanghai, and that a smaller city with a lower cost of living compensates with entirely different, non-salary perks — a distinction newcomers routinely miss.

Blind — a Silicon Valley engineer with fifteen years of experience and a total compensation package near $550,000 asked the platform what a "good" salary would look like if he relocated to Spain to be near aging parents. Replies ranged from blunt warnings that he'd be "exploited for lowball salaries" to more measured notes that Spain's special expat tax regime can soften, but never erase, a pay cut of that scale.

Quora — an employee approved for an internal transfer from the United States to Spain discovered the company intended to cut his pay by 30 percent for the move, and asked how to negotiate that reduction down to just 10 percent — a question that answers itself about how much room individual negotiation actually has once a relocation policy is already set.

The Bottom Line

If you're weighing an offer in China, spend less energy guessing the "right" number and more energy understanding the full bundle — bonus structure, housing fund, currency exposure — because that's where the real negotiation happens, slowly, over more meetings than you'd like. If you're weighing an offer in Spain, read the registro retributivo, understand which parts of your package are collectively bargained and therefore not actually up for discussion, and brace for what your gross number becomes once Spanish withholding is through with it. Neither system will tell you what your future colleague earns. One will at least show you the shape of the table; the other will, eventually, if you're patient enough, let you redesign it.

The honest version I'd give a friend over a drink: in China, don't ask what the salary is — ask what it's made of; in Spain, don't ask for a raise — ask for a seat at the review, because the calendar, not your case, decides when raises happen.