Salary in job adverts: how to write a pay line that pulls applications

7 minute read · Updated 2026-08-28

The salary in job adverts is the line most employers agonise over and most candidates read first. Leave it out and you are asking a stranger to spend twenty minutes applying for a number you will not tell them. Put it in properly, with a range and a reason, and you get more applications and far fewer collapsed offers. This guide covers how to build the pay line, what to do when you cannot publish a figure, and why competitive is the most expensive word in UK recruitment advertising.

Why competitive costs you candidates

A candidate comparing adverts on a phone is doing a filtering job, not a research job. An advert with no pay figure cannot be compared, so it gets skipped in favour of the three that can be. Worse, the people most likely to persist are the ones with least to lose, while the experienced candidate already earning a decent rate assumes, reasonably, that you would have published the number if it were good.

Hidden pay also pushes the disagreement to the end of the process, which is where it is most expensive. You screen, interview, check references, make an offer, and only then discover you are £4,000 apart. That is your time, your manager's time and a candidate who now tells other people that your process wasted their afternoon.

Building the salary in job adverts: the number, the basis and the mover

A good pay line has three parts: the number, the basis, and what moves someone up it.

• The number. A range with a defensible top and bottom: £29,000 to £34,000, or £13.20 to £14.60 an hour. Avoid ranges so wide they say nothing, such as £25,000 to £45,000.
• The basis. Per hour, per annum, pro rata for part time, plus the contracted hours. Say whether breaks are paid. Hourly candidates work out weekly take home in their head, so give them the numbers to do it with.
• The mover. One sentence on why someone lands at the top: a ticket, a registration, a shift pattern, years on a specific machine, a passed probation review. This alone reduces the number of candidates who apply expecting the maximum.

Then add the rest of the package, because it often wins the candidate outright. Overtime and premium rates, shift and weekend allowances, a pension contribution above the auto enrolment minimum, holiday above the statutory 5.6 weeks, company sick pay above Statutory Sick Pay, a van or fuel card, funded tickets such as SMSTS, an NMC registration fee or a Driver CPC block. If there is a bonus, state what triggers it and roughly when it pays.

Be honest about OTE

If you advertise on target earnings, give the basic separately and describe what a realistic performer earns rather than what the best person in the company earned once. A basic of £24,000 with an OTE of £45,000 will attract people, and it will also lose them again in month four when the commission does not materialise, at which point you pay to recruit twice.

Hourly roles and the National Living Wage

For hourly work the pay line is doing a very precise job, because the candidate is comparing you with a warehouse two miles away that pays forty pence more. Whatever you set must be at least the National Minimum Wage or National Living Wage for the person's age, and those rates rise every April, so an advert written last spring may now be quoting an unlawful figure.

If you are at or close to the floor, compete on everything else and say so explicitly: guaranteed contracted hours rather than zero hours, a fixed rota published in advance, paid travel time between calls in care roles, paid breaks, free parking, uniform provided, a genuine route to a supervisor rate. These are cheap for you and material to somebody budgeting weekly.

When you genuinely cannot publish a number

Sometimes internal parity or a confidential replacement makes a public figure difficult. Some options, in order of how well they work:

1. Publish a narrower range than the full band, for example £38,000 to £42,000 when the band runs to £46,000.
2. Publish the band and say the appointment will be made in the lower half for someone still building the specialist elements.
3. Publish a minimum: from £34,000, with the top of the range discussed at interview.
4. As a last resort, state the package in detail and give a named contact who will tell any caller the range on the phone.

What not to do is ask for current salary. It anchors your offer to someone else's decision, it carries a real risk of carrying pay discrimination forward under the Equality Act 2010, and it makes you look like you are hunting for a discount. Ask what they are looking for instead, at first phone screen, and say your range in the same breath.

Set the number before you advertise, not after

Decide your ceiling before the first application arrives, and write it down with the reason. Check three live adverts for the same role within twenty miles, check what you pay your existing staff for the same work, and check the gap. If the market has moved and you cannot follow it, you are choosing between paying more, hiring someone less experienced and training them, or living with a vacancy that costs you every week, which is set out in our guide to the cost of hiring an employee.

Whatever you settle on, keep it consistent between the advert, the phone screen, the interview and the written offer. Candidates who hear three different numbers withdraw, usually at the point when you have already turned everyone else down.

Next step: rewrite your pay line with the number, the basis and the mover, then post the role. If the advert is already live and quiet, our guide to a job advert getting no applications covers what else to change first.