Pay transparency could affect more than your job adverts
The government is consulting on requiring employers to publish pay information in job adverts, and to give candidates that information in writing before interview where there is no advert.
Most agencies will read that as a field to fill in. A later proposal in the same document could bring agencies within a new duty where they form part of a qualifying outsourced-labour arrangement.
These are proposals, not law. The consultation opened on 14 July 2026 and closes on 27 October 2026. Nothing described here has been legislated.
What is actually being proposed?
The Office for Equality and Opportunity is consulting on reform of the equal pay framework. Two parts matter to recruitment agencies.
The first is pay transparency in recruitment. The proposal is a requirement for all employers to publish pay information in job adverts, and where there is no advert, to give the candidate that information in writing before the interview. It would be introduced through a delegated power, with regulations setting the detail. The consultation gives the size of a salary range as an example of what those regulations might specify, and asks separately what pay information beyond basic salary would be proportionate and whether a range, a specific salary or a benchmark rate should be required.
The government has committed to an extended implementation period before any measures commence. The proposals are intended to cover Great Britain only, so agencies operating in Northern Ireland would sit outside them.
Many agencies already publish pay information
The consultation notes that most employers already publish pay ranges voluntarily, and plenty of agencies do the same as standard.
So adding a salary field is not the difficult part. The difficult part is that a published range is a commitment, and a commitment needs to be defensible before it appears anywhere.
That work happens before the advert. A credible range depends on agreement about what the role actually involves, what seniority it sits at, which skills are genuinely required rather than aspirational, and what the market is currently paying for that combination. If any of those are unresolved, the range published will either be too wide to mean anything or too low to attract the people the client says they want.
This is where recruiters hold evidence clients often do not. An agency working a market sees current candidate expectations, offers recently declined and why, what competing vacancies are paying, and how long comparable roles are taking to fill. A client setting a range from last year's salary band has none of that.
Two failure modes are worth naming. A range so wide it technically provides information while telling a candidate nothing. And a range nobody with budget authority actually approved, which tends to surface at offer stage.
Where the bigger change could sit for agencies
A later chapter of the same consultation proposes a duty on contracting parties to take all reasonable steps to uphold pay equality in contractual arrangements.
It is aimed at labour supply chains, and it names agencies, contractors, umbrella companies and labour providers among the external providers that could be in scope. The document is explicit that all companies involved in direct or indirect contractual relationships through which an outsourced worker's labour is obtained would be expected to take reasonable steps, including principals, intermediaries and service providers.
It would not reach every arrangement. The consultation proposes that qualifying work must meet a minimum threshold and be connected to a task of more than short-term duration, so a one-off engagement is unlikely to come within scope.
The consultation's own worked example runs from an engineering business awarding a maintenance contract, to a company using a labour provider to recruit workers, to an umbrella company paying them. Several contracts removed from the business whose uniform the workers wear.
What counts as reasonable would scale to size and circumstances. For a medium-sized employer acting as a principal or intermediary, the consultation suggests requesting pay and demographic data from other parties in the supply chain. The government proposes that a new Equal Pay Regulatory and Enforcement Unit would enforce the duty, bringing tribunal claims or using investigation powers rather than leaving it to individual claimants. Where that Unit would sit is still open, with the EHRC, the Fair Work Agency, another government agency and a new independent body all under consideration.
This part of the consultation is less developed than the advert proposal, and the eventual shape could look quite different.
What that could mean for a temp and contract supply chain
An agency supplying into construction, engineering or logistics frequently sits between a principal, a contractor and sometimes an umbrella company. Under a duty of this kind, being in the middle would not be a neutral position.
The proposal is not an automatic requirement to match every outsourced worker's pay with the client's own employees. It concerns reasonable steps to uphold pay equality, with expectations scaled to each party's circumstances.
Three questions are worth asking regardless of what the final rules say.
If a client's own employees are doing comparable work, could you get hold of the information needed to look at whether a pay difference raises an equality issue? For most agencies that data sits with the client.
Could you produce pay information by role across a given client if you were asked to? Not eventually, but within a reasonable period.
And where would that information come from? If pay data lives partly in the CRM, partly in timesheets and partly in a payroll system nobody in the recruitment team can access, assembling it is a project rather than a report.
Pay information has to be consistent to be evidenced
Pay moves through a lot of places on its way from brief to placement. The client's approved range, the advert on several channels, the recruiter's conversation with the candidate, the offer, the placement record, and whatever gets reported back to the client.
When those disagree, the agency cannot evidence what it advertised, what it discussed or what the final agreed placement or assignment rate was. That matters less today than it might if either proposal becomes law.
In Firefish, recruiters record salary and rate information against the job and the placement, so the figures behind an advert and the figures behind a placement sit on the same records.
A pay-ready vacancy checklist
Worth running against your next few roles.
- Has the client approved the range, and does the person who approved it control the budget?
- Is it realistic for the location and the skills actually required?
- Does it cover commission, day rate, shift premiums or other variable pay?
- Is the same figure showing on every channel the role is advertised on?
- Are recruiters describing it consistently to candidates?
- Where a range changed during the process, is the reason recorded?
- Could you report on applications and placements by advertised range?
The first three test whether the range is commercially credible. The last four test whether the agency can apply and evidence it consistently.
Answering the last four consistently depends on where pay information is held and whether it stays connected from the brief through to the placement.
Where to go next
The consultation document is published on GOV.UK and closes on 27 October 2026. Agencies can respond to it directly.
This is operational practice rather than legal guidance, and the proposals may change substantially before anything is legislated. Anything touching contracts, liability or supply chain exposure is worth putting to your own advisers.
