Organizational Transformation
Pay Transparency is Here—Are Your HR Leaders Ready?
Fair pay is top of mind for Australian employees. Learn how leading organisations are putting pay transparency practices to work in their rewards strategy.
July 02, 2025
How Australian Organisations are Gearing Up for Full Pay Disclosure
As cost of living pressures continue to bite Australian workers today, fair pay is top of mind. In fact, 83% of employees told us poor pay and compensation is the main reason they’d leave their company. And pay is just behind job security as the most important factor when searching for a new job.
If you aren’t sharing salary ranges openly, you can be certain people will start crowdsourcing pay data themselves. The momentum for pay transparency is regulatory-led, but it’s also happening at a grassroots level. This includes water cooler chats, social media shares and AI search, to community groups advocating for pay transparency like The Aussie Corporate’s Graduate Salary Guide.
“It’s no longer a question of ‘should we have pay transparency’, but ‘how are we going to deal with pay transparency’,” said Total Rewards expert Emma Grogan at a recent Korn Ferry rewards trends event in Sydney. “Employees are saying, ‘we want pay transparency—and if you don’t give it to us, we’ll do it ourselves’.”
Everything is on the table, from the criteria used to determine pay and pay progression, starting salaries for new recruits, and even pay ranges for existing employees. So is your organisation ready for full, or even partial, disclosure?
What is Pay Transparency?
Pay transparency is the practice of openly sharing how roles are paid.
That doesn’t mean everyone knows what all of their colleagues are being paid.
It might involve communicating the criteria used to determine pay decisions and pay progression, remuneration ranges for open jobs, or for existing roles within an organisation. Those ranges could be averages, or minimums and maximums.
Around the world, 12% of global companies already have a pay transparency strategy, and another 44% are working on it. Grogan says she’s starting to see multinationals in Australia adopt globally consistent pay transparency policies, in line with the regulation roll outs in the EU and US.
Australia already has one of the strongest executive pay disclosure requirements globally, and mandatory pay equity reporting has lifted the lid on entrenched gender inequities at organisations with 100+ employees. From December 2022, the ban on pay secrecy clauses in employment contracts opened the door to disclosure between employees.
“People want to know they are treated fairly, and that pay decisions reflect the value and contribution they’re making to the organisation. Not because of subjective factors like gender or cultural background, or because I’m not as good a negotiator as the person sitting next to me,” said Grogan.
Getting Clarity on Gender Pay Equity
Pay transparency also includes reporting pay gaps between employee groups, which is already legislated in Australia through the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012.
“We still see a big gender pay gap, with very minor improvements,” noted Korn Ferry’s Kerem Alpaslan, Total Rewards and Work Measurement Delivery Leader, at the event.
The latest Australian Korn Ferry Rewards Trends data allows us to dig deeper into the WGEA-reported top line gap, which was 21.8% in 2023-24.
Korn Ferry’s analysis of 440,000+ Australian employees showed the average male makes 12.7% more than the average female. Even when we reduce the impact of having more men in technical, high-paying roles, the gap is still 2.6%—for the exact same role.
The ROI on Pay Transparency
Pay transparency responds to societal and regulatory pressures, but it also has other upsides.
“Managing pay equity and transparency well can have a positive benefit in terms of employee attraction and motivation. It can lead to improved trust in leadership, better employee engagement, reduced employee turnover, an uptick in brand and reputation, and increased workforce diversity,” said Grogan.
Australian turnover is still relatively high at 13.6% in 2024-25, when compared with global benchmarks. With pay the number one driver for leaving, the cost benefit analysis on pay transparency stacks up.
Putting Pay Transparency to Work
Australian organisations also need to be clear about how pay decisions are made—a difficult task without a robust job architecture model and robust salary range. Leaders also need the ability to fairly and consistently make decisions within such ranges, and a consistent internal comms strategy.
“We encourage leaders to have those pay conversations as part of the annual remuneration review process,” said AMP’s Head of Reward Vera Martin during the event panel discussion. This year, her team used Co-pilot to generate scripts for leaders to support those conversations.
“We’re encouraging employees to talk with their leaders. And we’ve refreshed our job architecture framework to make that much more transparent for our employees—not just for leaders,” she said.
Like many other ASX-listed companies, AMP is also focused on its executive remuneration frameworks. Grogan noted many clients are concerned with finding the right balance that is “aligned with their culture, attracts and retains the executives they want, and also avoids a shareholder strike.”
Pay Transparency Can Win the War for Talent
With inflationary and economic pressure, Australian employers are looking for new ways to stretch their merit increase budget as far as possible, across all pay levels.
Korn Ferry’s salary increase forecast for 2025 is 3.5% in Australia, with some sectors as high as 4%—including resources, oil and gas, financial services, and utilities.
“Many clients are looking offshore for talent, because those skills don’t historically reside in Australia,” said Nick Pinner, who heads up Korn Ferry’s industrial practice. “For example, defence is breaking new ground in terms of our nuclear capability, and we don’t have enough linesmen in Australia to build the transmission lines connecting renewable energy projects back to the grid.”
Because those clients are competing globally for scarce skills, this opens up new challenges for pay transparency.
One opportunity is to think holistically about the whole package—including housing support in more expensive regions, wellbeing benefits, product discounts, and variable pay for performance programs.
As long as every element of compensation is clear and transparent, is considered fair, and leaders have the appropriate capability and access to the right data to support such conversations, these strategies can be a powerful differentiator. Because when it comes to pay transparency, the information is already in the hands of your employees.
Learn more about Korn Ferry Pay.
Related insights
