The Polish Parliament will debate a new bill that would require Polish employers to provide compensation information in job postings.

Why do so few Polish companies provide salary information in job postings? Poles are not accustomed to publicly disclosing their wages, and it is considered impolite to ask about the earnings of coworkers or relatives. Wages are usually not recorded in job postings and must be negotiated once you enter the interview stage of the recruitment process, as you might have discovered during your job quest in Poland. Though legal and widely practised, the practise has significant disadvantages.

For starters, the recruiting process takes longer and costs more money. Second, a lack of pay transparency can contribute to greater workplace inequities, such as gender pay gaps. Finally, if you are a newcomer with no prior experience in the Polish job market, estimating the average salary for a given position can be difficult.

At the same time, according to the 2018 Hays study on pay transparency, approximately 87 percent of job seekers in Poland agree that a salary range is a piece of knowledge that most job postings ignore. The same number of respondents agree that they are more likely to apply to businesses that provide wage specifics in their advertisements, and approximately 76 percent of interviewees believe employers should be legally required to include such information. A new bill that would make it mandatory for businesses to report wage ranges was introduced in Poland's Parliament last month, so it is likely that they will in the near future. The bill was introduced by the Civil Coalition parliamentary club (Koalicja Obywatelska), which argued that the new legislation would help fight gender inequality, among other items. Companies that do not provide wage details in their postings or provide lower pay than advertised face a PLN 30,000 fine. In the coming months, the Polish Parliament will discuss the bill.