Austrian job postings are about four times as likely as German ones to state pay. Here is how we checked.

Disclosure: written by Job Opportunities API (JOA, jobopportunitiesapi.org), an independent data business that sells job-posting data through an API. AI helped write and check the analysis and this text; Loukas (Luca) Tzekos is editorially responsible. Contact: [e-mail].

Austria has required job adverts to state a minimum pay since 2011. Germany has no such rule. We asked our own data how that shows up in practice, then tested our own measurement before publishing. The full report, with every table, is at https://jobopportunitiesapi.org/reports/job-market-september-2026 and comes with a free CSV, a Markdown version and an audio edition of about 46 minutes (synthetic voice).

The data

Job Opportunities API (JOA) reads job postings from employers' own recruiting systems and careers pages and re-checks each one daily. On 4 October 2026 that was a snapshot of 2,111,453 open postings from 144,098 employers. The report analyses the 1,385,899 located in North America (986,641) and Europe (399,258). The report compares them with official vacancy statistics in 14 countries, and across the 51 US jurisdictions their distribution follows the official JOLTS openings (rank correlation 0.96). Read everything below as a description of JOA's own postings.

Austria and Germany

JOA's automated reading detected a pay figure in 33.7% of 7,666 open Austrian postings and in 4.9% of 117,969 German ones, a ratio of 6.9 to 1. The gap holds inside every recruiting system with at least 150 Austrian postings, so the mix of software does not explain it.

Automated detection reads only part of what postings say, so we measured the rest. Two AI agents with web access read stratified random samples of 84 Austrian and 100 German postings, blind to our flags, on the live page where it was still open and otherwise from stored text. A script checked each quoted passage against the text. A second, rule-based detector agreed with the readers on 97.6% of Austrian and 91.0% of German postings.

How we checked ourselves

The sample showed where detection falls short: compound words, amounts written in unusual formats, and figures that appear on the live page outside the stored description. Where our system had detected pay, readers confirmed it in 28 of 28 Austrian and 24 of 29 German postings. Weighted to the full population, the estimate of postings that state pay is 78% in Austria (95% interval 70% to 86%) and 18% in Germany (13% to 26%).

So the headline is: Austrian postings are about four times as likely as German ones to state a pay figure, 4.4 to 1 on the sampled estimate (interval 2.9 to 6.2). The intervals reflect sampling and clustering by employer, and the readers are AI agents. Austria's rule requires the collective-agreement minimum, and about 38% of the amounts we read from Austrian text are that minimum, so we publish whether pay is present and no pay levels. The same checks put the share of postings located in another country than coded at 6.0% for Germany and about 6% for Austria.

A similar question in the United States

In the United States, 24.4% of own-site postings in the 10 jurisdictions with a pay-range posting law have pay detected in a structured field, against 18.7% in 28 states without one (both are lower bounds: detection misses some stated pay).

That is an association, and states differ in other ways: national employers often publish one posting for all states, and laws differ in thresholds and exemptions. Pennsylvania, with no law found, reaches 27.2%; Illinois, with a law, 19.5%. Research with other data puts the effect of such laws at about 30 percentage points, a different quantity from this cross-section.

Read the Methodology

Job boards, aggregators, employer-direct data and official statistics measure different things: boards can count the same vacancy across several portals, official surveys count vacancies at all employers, and JOA counts what employers publish on their own systems. The Methodology section of the report sets out the differences and how to compare them.

Take it further

1. Detected pay is detection; it says nothing on whether an employer follows a law.
2. A blind sample of your own data is a cheap way to find what a parser misses.
3. Say what the source is: here, employer-direct postings that JOA serves.

All aggregates are free under CC BY 4.0: https://jobopportunitiesapi.org/reports/job-market-september-2026/joa-job-market-2026-09.csv. The tables also have a citable record with a DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23143502. Spot an error? Write to [e-mail] with the subject "Market report correction".

About the data. Job Opportunities API (JOA, jobopportunitiesapi.org) is an independent data business that sells API access to job-posting data. It collects postings from employers' own recruiting systems and careers pages and from a few public employment service feeds, re-checks them daily and honours employer opt-outs. The September 2026 report analyses the 1,385,899 open employer-direct postings located in North America (986,641) and Europe (399,258), from a snapshot of 2,111,453 postings by 144,098 employers on 4 October 2026, and compares them with official vacancy statistics. The report and its data are free to reuse (CC BY 4.0). AI helped write and check the analysis; Loukas (Luca) Tzekos is editorially responsible. Contact: [e-mail]