Pay transparency in Lithuania: the salary should be in the job ad, by law
Scroll through cvbankas.lt or cv.lt for ten minutes and you'll notice something. Most job ads show a salary or a range, and a few don't. If you come from Germany, the UK, or the US, the ones that do can feel unusual, almost oversharing. They shouldn't. In Lithuania, publishing the pay has been mandatory since 2019, and the ads that leave it out are the ones bending the rules, not the other way around. As of June 2026 the country layered a second, EU-wide set of rights on top. Here is what you are actually entitled to, what to do when an employer ignores it, and where to get a number of your own before you ever walk into the room.
The salary should already be in the ad, and that's the law
Since 27 July 2019, the Lithuanian Labour Code has required every job advertisement to state either the specific salary on offer or the pay range the employer is willing to pay (Ius Laboris / COBALT). This is not a guideline or a nudge. It is a legal obligation, and it predates the EU directive everyone is talking about by seven years.
A few details matter in practice. The figure has to be the base (tariff) pay, the fixed monthly or hourly rate, not the theoretical total once bonuses and commissions are stacked on. The ad also has to make clear whether the number is gross (before tax) or net (after tax), because in Lithuania the gap between the two is large. And an employer cannot game it by publishing only a floor. "From €2,000, no upper limit" or "as much as you can earn" does not satisfy the rule; the top of the range has to be stated clearly (State Labour Inspectorate). The obligation attaches to the advertisement itself, which means it follows the ad onto whatever platform it lands on: cvbankas.lt, cv.lt, cvonline.lt, a LinkedIn post, the company's own careers page, even an internal notice board. There is no channel where the salary becomes optional.
What changed in June 2026
On top of that older rule, Lithuania has now transposed the EU Pay Transparency Directive (2023/970), with most provisions taking effect on 7 June 2026, one of only a handful of the 27 member states to hit the deadline (WTW). For a job seeker, three changes are worth knowing.
First, employers can no longer ask about your current salary or salary history. That question, the one that quietly anchors your next offer to your last one, is now off the table, which matters most if you are arriving from a lower-paying market and don't want your old number following you. Second, you have an explicit right to talk about your own pay; contract clauses that forbid discussing salary with colleagues are no longer enforceable. Third, from 2027 you will be able to ask your employer how your pay compares to the average for the same work, or work of equal value, broken down by gender, and they must answer within a month. Larger companies, those with 100 or more staff, will also have to report their gender pay gaps, with the social insurance fund Sodra collecting the underlying data centrally. Lithuania's unadjusted gender pay gap was around 10% in 2024, close to the EU average, so this is not a theoretical problem. If you want to understand how any of this fits the wider picture of building a career here, that is covered in Is Lithuania a good place to build a career, or just a stepping stone?.
How to report an ad that hides the pay
If you spot a Lithuanian job ad with no salary, the body that enforces the rule is the State Labour Inspectorate (Valstybinė darbo inspekcija, or VDI). You do not need to be the applicant, and you do not need to give your name. The simplest route is the VDI's "Žinok teises" (Know Your Rights) mobile app, which lets you document a violation and submit it anonymously. You can also call the trust hotline on 1882, email info@vdi.lt, or use the consultation line at (8 5) 213 9772. For the employer, the consequence is an administrative fine of between €80 and €880, levied on the head of the organisation or the responsible person (State Labour Inspectorate).
The VDI is the right address for the missing-salary problem specifically. If your issue is discrimination rather than a blank ad, being paid less than a colleague for the same work because of your gender, for example, that belongs with a different body: the Office of the Equal Opportunities Ombudsperson (lygybe.lt). Complaints there have to be in writing and in Lithuanian, and you have three months from the date of the violation to file. If you are not sure whether your situation qualifies, the office takes questions by email at lygybe@lygybe.lt or by phone on +370 5 205 0640 before you commit to a formal complaint.
Where to get your own number
The salary in the ad tells you what one employer will pay. It does not tell you whether that number is good. For that you benchmark, and Lithuania is unusually generous with the data.
The standout tool is Sodra's open company data, where the average wage every registered employer actually pays is published from social-contribution records (atvira.sodra.lt). You can look up a specific company and see roughly what it pays on average, which is a reality check no glossy careers page can spin. The site rekvizitai.lt surfaces the same Sodra figures in a friendlier layout. For a view by role rather than by employer, the Official Statistics Portal breaks average gross earnings down by occupation, sector, region, and experience (osp.stat.gov.lt), and crowd-sourced sites like Manoalga and the cvbankas salary guide fill in the gaps by position. For tech and international roles, Glassdoor, Levels.fyi, and LinkedIn add a cross-border layer. And from 2027, your own employer becomes a data source too, since you will be able to request how your pay sits against the average for equal work.
One thing to hold onto while you compare: check gross against net, and check the sector, not just the national headline. The average full-time wage in Lithuania was around €2,480 gross, or about €1,514 net, in late 2025 (LRT / Sodra), but IT sat near €3,600 and finance near €3,380, while hospitality was well below the average. A number that looks strong against the national figure can be mediocre for your field. If most of your options are in the English-speaking corner of the market, the pattern behind that is worth reading too: Is Lithuania an English-friendly country?
A final thought
The range in a Lithuanian job ad is a floor, not a ceiling, and for the first time you have the tools to know whether it is a fair one. That is the quiet effect of pay transparency: it shifts a little bargaining power back toward the candidate. When you already know what the company pays on average and what the market pays for your role, the old interview trap, "so, what are your salary expectations?", stops being a trap and becomes a question you can answer with a number and a source. The mistake foreigners tend to make here is not accepting a low offer. It is negotiating blind in one of the few countries that hands you the data for free. Before you send the application, the groundwork in What Lithuanian employers actually look for in a CV is what gets you into the room where the number is finally on the table.