🇦🇺 Australia · 🇳🇱 Netherlands
By Priya Mehta, The Global Office
In Australia, a recruiter will tell you the salary band in the first phone screen, mostly because a federal agency now publishes your future employer's gender pay gap on a public website whether they like it or not. In the Netherlands, the job ad will say "competitive salary," the recruiter will say "let's discuss," and by the third round you will still not know if the number is 55,000 euros or 85,000. Both countries consider themselves plain-spoken. Only one of them means it about money.
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| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Ask about the salary range in the first call — it's expected, not aggressive | Assume the advertised number includes superannuation; it usually doesn't |
| Check your prospective employer's WGEA gender pay gap listing before you sign | Bring up your previous salary as leverage — total package benchmarking is the norm now |
| Negotiate total remuneration (super, leave loading, bonuses) as one package | Undersell yourself out of politeness — directness reads as competence, not greed |
| Use industry salary surveys (Hays, SEEK) to anchor your number | Expect movement on base pay without also raising flexibility or leave |
| Get everything in writing before the contract stage | Treat the first offer as final — a counter is expected, not rude |
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Research your CAO (collective labor agreement) pay scale before any interview | Expect the job ad to state a real number — "competitive" is doing a lot of work |
| Ask specifically about the 30% tax ruling if you're relocating from abroad | Assume confidence reads as competence — overselling is viewed with suspicion |
| Negotiate the "intangibles" — holiday days, training budget, hybrid policy | Push hard on base salary alone and ignore vacation days, pension, and 13th-month pay |
| Wait for pay transparency rules to formally land (2027) but ask anyway now | Bring up your last salary as an anchor point — Dutch hiring managers rarely respond to it |
| Get comfortable with silence in a negotiation — it isn't a rejection | Mistake modesty norms for an invitation to lowball yourself |
Australia has spent the last three years turning salary secrecy into a compliance problem. Under the Workplace Gender Equality Act, employers with 100 or more staff must report gender pay data annually, and as of 3 March 2026, WGEA published gender pay gaps for roughly 8,500 employers and 1,600 corporate groups on its public Data Explorer. From April 2026, large private employers (500-plus staff) must also select and report progress against gender equality targets. The Australian Bureau of Statistics puts the national gender pay gap at 11.5 percent as of May 2025 — women earning, on average, 88 cents for every dollar men earn.
The practical effect is a workplace culture where salary is no longer a taboo topic so much as a slightly embarrassing public record. Job seekers now routinely check a prospective employer's WGEA listing the way they'd check a Glassdoor rating. The Fair Work Ombudsman's own guidance nudges employers toward transparent pay structures, less because of altruism and more because opacity now looks like a liability. Negotiation, meanwhile, remains a fairly unbothered national sport: Australians expect a counteroffer, expect superannuation to be discussed separately from base pay, and expect that quoting a market range (rather than a single number) is simply how adults talk about money.
The Netherlands is, on paper, about to become one of the more pay-transparent labor markets in Europe. The EU Pay Transparency Directive will require Dutch employers to disclose a starting salary or range in the job posting or before the first interview, and will ban employers from asking candidates about previous pay. The catch is the timeline: Dutch implementation has been pushed to 1 January 2027, which means the current reality is still the opposite of the future one. Job ads today lean on the word "competitive" as a placeholder, and pay scales are governed by sector-wide collective labor agreements (CAOs) that both anchor and obscure what an individual might actually earn.
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For internationals, the CAO system is simultaneously reassuring and opaque — it means pay bands are rarely arbitrary, but it also means your negotiating room is narrower than it looks. The one lever that genuinely moves the needle is the 30% ruling, a tax facility that can shelter a meaningful chunk of income for qualifying relocated employees, worth negotiating for explicitly rather than assuming HR will raise it. Dutch negotiation style itself runs on a cultural expectation of understatement: this is a Hofstede "Masculinity" outlier — Netherlands scores among the lowest in the world on that dimension, reflecting a culture that rewards modesty and consensus over visible ambition, a sharp contrast with Australia's comparatively assertive, higher-scoring profile on the same measure.
The irony is that Australia, a country that still enjoys a reputation for laid-back informality, now runs one of the more bureaucratically transparent pay systems in the developed world — while the Netherlands, famous for its bluntness (the Dutch will tell you your haircut is bad before you ask), goes conspicuously quiet exactly when the topic turns to money. Both cultures believe they are being direct. Australians are direct about the number. The Dutch are direct about everything except the number.
The second irony is timing. Australia's transparency regime is already live and biting; the Netherlands' equivalent doesn't take effect until 2027, meaning anyone moving there in the next eighteen months will negotiate under the old opaque rules while reading news coverage about the new transparent ones. Anyone moving to Australia, by contrast, walks into a system already mid-reform, with real public data to consult before they even apply.
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r/expats — One American who relocated to Amsterdam for a tech role described spending three interview rounds without a number on the table, only to realize afterward that the company's internal CAO scale would have told them the range from day one, if anyone had thought to ask directly instead of waiting to be told.
Quora — A respondent working in Sydney corporate finance noted that the biggest adjustment for colleagues arriving from Asia and the US wasn't the number itself but the format — Australians expect you to name a range anchored to market data and then negotiate the whole package, not just haggle over one figure.
iamexpat.nl (Netherlands expat career forum) — A recurring theme in reader comments is that newcomers leave real money on the table by not knowing to ask about the 30% ruling before signing, with some estimating the gap at five figures annually once tax treatment is factored in.
Quora — Another respondent flagged that in Australian workplaces, advertised salaries are conventionally understood as exclusive of superannuation unless stated otherwise, a distinction that trips up almost every candidate moving from a market where super doesn't exist as a separate line item.
r/expats — A Dutch-based commenter advised that pushing hard on base salary alone, while ignoring vacation days, pension contributions, and the customary 13th-month payment, is a rookie mistake — in a CAO-governed system, those levers often move further than the base number ever will.
If you're weighing an Australian offer, do your homework on the WGEA Data Explorer before the first call and negotiate the total package out loud — it's expected, not confrontational. If you're weighing a Dutch one, do your homework on the relevant CAO scale, ask explicitly about the 30% ruling, and don't mistake the vague job ad for the real ceiling. The deeper difference isn't how much either country pays — it's who's required to tell you. Either way, over drinks I'd say: in Australia, ask for the number. In the Netherlands, ask for the number, then ask again, more specifically, twice.
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Priya Mehta
Staff writer covering financial markets and corporate strategy. Has strong opinions about spreadsheets.