"You Don't Talk About Money, You Have Money": Pay Culture in the USA and Germany

🇺🇸 USA · 🇩🇪 Germany

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

An American job posting in 2026 increasingly comes with a salary band attached by law — more than a dozen US states now require it — while the number itself remains a subject people will happily discuss over lunch. A German job posting is far less likely to state a number at all, and the number you do eventually land on is one you may be actively discouraged from mentioning to the colleague sitting next to you, even though a 2017 law explicitly protects your right to do so. Germany has the stronger legal protection for pay transparency. America has the stronger cultural habit of actually talking about it.

Do's & Don'ts

🇺🇸 USA

🇩🇪 Germany

The USA's approach to pay has shifted rapidly and unevenly over the past several years. Paycor's 2026 tracking shows more than a dozen states plus Washington D.C. now mandate salary range disclosure in job postings, with real teeth — Colorado, Washington, and New York have issued penalties running into the thousands per violation. The effect is measurable: postings with disclosed ranges show roughly 3.6 percent higher advertised pay and about 1.3 percent higher actual earnings, suggesting transparency laws are doing real work, not just cosmetic work. Layered on top of legal disclosure is a long-standing cultural comfort with negotiation — asking for more is expected, not awkward, and refusing to negotiate is often treated as leaving money on the table rather than as good manners.

Germany's pay culture runs on a genuine contradiction that's only recently starting to resolve. The Entgelttransparenzgesetz, in force since 2017, explicitly protects employees' right to discuss salary with each other and grants workers at companies with 200-plus employees the right to request comparable pay data — legal protections that, on paper, are stronger than most American state laws. And yet the cultural habit has lagged far behind the law: a long-standing German saying, "you don't talk about money, you have money" (or its Anglophone-repeated cousin, "über Geld spricht man nicht"), has kept salary conversations largely private even where the law explicitly permits them. That's visibly shifting — figures.hr's 2024 survey found 47 percent of German employees now discuss salary more openly than two years prior — and the incoming 2026 EU Pay Transparency Directive is set to invalidate pay-secrecy clauses in contracts outright.

The Reckoning

The irony sits right at the center of this comparison: Germany has had the stronger legal right to salary transparency for years, and the weaker cultural habit of using it. The US has the messier, state-by-state legal patchwork, and the stronger cultural instinct to talk numbers anyway. If you're the kind of professional who reads legal protection as a signal for social behavior, Germany will surprise you — the right to discuss pay openly existed years before people actually started exercising it in any real numbers.

Negotiation itself, though, turns out to be the one place both cultures actually agree: neither treats a first offer as final, and both expect you to make a case for more. The difference is what "making a case" looks like — an American negotiation often leans on market-rate comparisons and competing offers; a German negotiation, per direct-communication norms, leans harder on a plain, evidence-based account of your specific value to the company.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — Someone answering why discussing salary is considered taboo in Germany even though it's not legally forbidden said the discomfort has less to do with the law and more to do with a broader cultural association between talking about money and being seen as either boastful or envious, a stigma that outlasts whatever legal protection exists.

Quora — A response to "how to negotiate my salary in Germany" advised coming with specific, quantified achievements rather than general enthusiasm, noting that vague appeals to being a "hard worker" land far worse in German negotiations than a concrete account of measurable impact.

Blind — A "Compensation in Germany" thread turned into an extended comparison of total pay packages, with several posters from American tech backgrounds expressing surprise at how much base-salary-focused German offers were, compared to the equity- and bonus-heavy structures they were used to negotiating around.

Blind — A "Germany salary — tips to negotiate?" thread noted that the flood of American and international tech companies expanding into Germany post-remote-work has begun pushing local salary norms upward, creating real negotiating leverage for candidates willing to reference those higher offers directly.

Conclusion

If you're moving to the US, check your state's disclosure rules before you even apply, and treat the posted range as a genuine opening position to negotiate from, not a fixed number. If you're moving to Germany, know that your legal right to ask about comparable pay is real and increasingly enforceable, even if the office culture around actually using it is still catching up — and negotiate your own offer regardless of what colleagues around you seem to be doing. My honest line for a friend over drinks: in America, ask around and ask for more. In Germany, know your legal rights, use them quietly if you have to, and negotiate like the law is already fully on your side — because by 2026, it basically is.