Should Kenyan Employers Be Forced to Display Salary Ranges on Job Advertisements?

"Salary: Competitive." Every Kenyan jobseeker has scrolled past that phrase a thousand times, and every one of them knows it means almost nothing. Competitive compared to what? Set by whom? You send in your CV, sit through two or three interview rounds, sometimes a skills test, and only at the very end — often after you have already mentally moved into the role — does a number finally appear. If it is disappointing, you have burned weeks for nothing. If you ask too early, you risk looking like pay is all you care about. The whole system is built to keep the applicant guessing for as long as possible.

That has led to a genuinely uncomfortable question for Kenya's labour market: should employers simply be required to state the salary range upfront? The honest answer involves real trade-offs on both sides — but Kenya already has more of an answer than most people realise, hiding in its own laws and its own public sector.

What Kenyan Law Already Requires (and Doesn't)

Kenya is not a pay-secrecy free-for-all. The Employment Act No. 11 of 2007 already builds transparency into the employment relationship — just at the wrong end of it. Section 5(5) requires that "an employer shall pay his employees equal remuneration for work of equal value." Section 10(2)(h) requires every written contract to specify "the remuneration, scale or rate of remuneration, the method of calculating that remuneration and details of any other benefits." Section 20 goes further, requiring itemised pay statements showing the gross amount of wages and every deduction.

In other words, Kenyan law already insists on pay transparency — for people who have already been hired. The gap is entirely on the front end: nothing in the Act requires that same number to be disclosed to an applicant before they apply, interview, negotiate and accept. You are legally entitled to a transparent payslip the moment you are an employee. You have no legal right to know what that payslip will say before you spend weeks trying to become one.

Kenya Already Has a Working Model — In the Public Sector

Here is the part of this debate that rarely gets mentioned: Kenya does not need to invent mandatory salary transparency from scratch, because a large part of its own labour market already runs on it. The Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC) is constitutionally mandated to "set and regularly review the remuneration and benefits of all State officers," and it does so through published job group structures and salary scales that anyone can look up before applying for a public service position. A teacher, a magistrate or a county officer job seeker in Kenya already knows, in advance, roughly what the job pays.

If transparent, pre-published salary structures work well enough to run the entire public service — arguably the most scrutinised employer category in the country — the claim that Kenya's private sector could not possibly function under similar disclosure starts to look less like an economic law and more like a preference.

The Case for Mandatory Salary Ranges

The efficiency argument is the easiest to make: hidden salaries waste enormous amounts of time on both sides of the hiring process, sending applicants through full interview cycles for roles they would never have accepted at the true offer. But the harder-edged argument is about equity. A UN Women brief on Kenya's gender pay gap puts the unadjusted gap at 17.7% on an hourly basis and 31.3% on a monthly basis, narrowing to 9.5% once education, occupation, sector and other measurable factors are accounted for — a residual gap researchers commonly attribute in part to differences in negotiating position and information asymmetry between employer and candidate. When only one side of a salary negotiation knows the real number, the side with less bargaining power, disproportionately women and first-time jobseekers, tends to lose the most.

Kenya would also not be inventing this wheel alone globally. The European Union's Pay Transparency Directive (EU) 2023/970 now requires employers across member states to disclose the starting salary or pay range in job postings or before candidate interviews, precisely on the reasoning that hidden pay entrenches unequal outcomes that are otherwise invisible until it is too late to negotiate.

The Case for Employer Flexibility

Employers' objections are not simply stubbornness, either. A published range can become a ceiling in practice even when it was meant as a floor, discouraging strong candidates from negotiating upward. Publicly listing pay can hand competitors precise information about a company's cost structure and hiring plans. Roles that flex significantly by experience, location or negotiated benefits are hard to compress into a single honest number without the range becoming so wide it tells applicants nothing useful. And for Kenya's vast informal and small-business economy — the sector now generating roughly nine in ten new jobs — a rigid disclosure mandate designed with large formal employers in mind risks becoming another compliance burden that mostly just gets ignored.

These are legitimate operational concerns. They are arguments for how a disclosure requirement should be designed — a reasonable range rather than a single figure, thresholds based on company size, phased rollout — not arguments that transparency is inherently unworkable, given that Kenya's own public sector already proves otherwise at enormous scale.

Where Janta Connect Fits In

Kenya does not need to wait for Parliament to settle this debate before job seekers get more clarity than "salary: competitive." A platform can simply make disclosure the norm rather than the exception: surfacing salary ranges wherever employers are willing to share them, flagging listings that do, and making that information a visible, comparable part of every posting rather than something extracted only after multiple interview rounds. Janta Connect is built around exactly that principle — treating pay information as a normal, expected part of a transparent hiring process, not a secret to be protected until an offer letter.

For employers, that is also a competitive advantage rather than a liability: candidates increasingly self-select toward listings that respect their time enough to say what the job pays, and employers who disclose early tend to spend less time on applicants who were never going to accept the eventual number anyway.

The Future of Work in Kenya

Kenya's law already accepts the core premise of pay transparency — it simply applies it one step too late, after the contract is signed rather than before the application is submitted. Its own public sector already runs, successfully and at scale, on published salary structures that job seekers can consult in advance. The question is no longer really whether transparent pay is workable in Kenya. It already is, for a large share of the labour market. The remaining question is whether the private sector will be pushed, regulated, or simply choose to catch up — and whether "salary: competitive" quietly disappears from Kenyan job ads before the law ever forces the issue.