How Many Remote Jobs Actually Tell You the Pay
Across the ~8,600 remote-first postings we track, only 40.9% name a salary — and the roles with the most market power are the most likely to show a number. A look at who discloses, who stays quiet, and what the disclosed numbers reveal.
You read the mission. You read the stack. You read the line about competitive compensation. And then you're expected to book a call to find out whether the job clears your rent.
Across the ~8,600 remote-first postings we track at Remotera, only 3,528 of 8,629 (40.9%) disclose any salary at all. Flip that around: roughly 59% tell you nothing about pay before you apply. This is a remote-first, tech- and crypto-heavy slice of the market — not a census of every job — but it's a clean window into how the borderless end of hiring talks about money.
The transparency gap
Silence clusters by role
Disclosure isn't spread evenly, and the pattern is almost the opposite of what you'd guess. The most secretive corner is QA — only 42 of 197 postings (21%) name a number. Frontend (23/89, 26%) and content (20/76, 26%) aren't far behind, with business development (49/182, 27%) close by.
At the open end sits the most in-demand talent. ML/AI discloses at 117/267 (44%) — more than double QA's rate. Backend (191/553, 35%), design (87/244, 36%) and product (153/428, 36%) fill the middle. The people with the most leverage are the ones most likely to see a number up front.
What the disclosed numbers say
For the postings that do name a figure, the band is wide. Across the 3,318 in-bounds disclosed roles, the median advertised top-of-range is $141,476. The tenth percentile sits at $47,840; the twenty-fifth at $84,000; the seventy-fifth at $209,774; and the ninetieth at $275,000.
That's a $227k gap between the tenth and ninetieth percentile — which is exactly why the 59% of silence is so expensive. Without a number, you can't tell whether a role is bottom-decile or top-decile until you've already spent the application.
“The people with the most market power — ML/AI engineers — are the most likely to show a number. The workers with the least see it least.”
What to do with this
For job seekers: treat a missing salary as a data point, not a neutral gap. Roles that disclose skew toward higher-leverage functions; the quiet ones cluster in QA, content, and frontend. Ask for the range early — you're negotiating against the 40.9% who already published one.
For employers: with 59% of postings silent on pay, a concrete number is an instant filter that gets you better-matched applicants and less wasted screening. Silence reads as low, whether or not it is.