Salary bands in every driver job ad: writing trucking vacancies under the EU Pay Transparency Directive

On 7 June 2026, Directive (EU) 2023/970 becomes law across the EU. Every transport company posting a driver vacancy — in Warsaw, in Dublin, in Munich, anywhere — has to include a salary range. Not on request. Not before the second interview. In the ad, or at the very latest before the first conversation with a candidate.

For office-based roles this is inconvenient. For trucking it is genuinely complicated, because driver pay is never one number. It is a base wage plus kilometres, plus ADR premiums, plus per diems, plus weekend supplements, and sometimes a thirteenth month. Writing a pay transparency directive job ad salary section that is both legally defensible and honest to how drivers actually get paid requires thinking through each of those layers — and knowing which country's rules govern which layer.

Here is what you need to know, in plain language, before the deadline.

The rule is simple. The trucking reality is not.

The directive has four hard rules that apply to every employer, large or small, from 7 June 2026.

First, any job posting must include the initial pay level or salary range — based on objective, gender-neutral criteria — before the first interview or negotiation takes place. Second, you are no longer allowed to ask a candidate what they currently earn. Third, job titles in postings must be gender-neutral. Fourth, pay-secrecy clauses in employment contracts are void.

On top of that, employees have a right to request pay information for comparable roles within two months, and companies with 150 or more workers must file their first gender pay gap report in 2027 using 2026 payroll data. If that report shows a gap of 5% or more in any category that cannot be objectively justified, a joint pay assessment follows — and the burden of proof shifts to the employer.

None of this is administratively light. But the piece that makes it hard for transport companies specifically is the structure of driver pay itself.

A long-haul CE driver working for a Polish carrier doing Gdańsk–Hamburg–Rotterdam–Antwerp–back does not have one rate. For the domestic leg, Polish labour law applies. The moment that truck is doing a delivery inside Germany — cabotage — the driver is a posted worker, and German minimum remuneration kicks in. In France, French rates. In Belgium, Belgian collective agreement PC 140. The Mobility Package (Directive (EU) 2020/1057) created this layer-cake in 2022, and the Pay Transparency Directive is now landing on top of it.

What the job ad's salary field has to reflect is the home-country contract — the base, the bonuses, the allowances. What the ad should also flag is that for posted-driver legs, host-country minimums apply by law. No EU regulator has issued transport-specific guidance on how to combine these two things cleanly. The IRU and the ETF jointly wrote to the Commission in May 2025 asking for exactly that. They are still waiting.

Where the law actually stands right now

If you assumed all 27 member states would be ready by 7 June 2026, you assumed wrong. As of mid-May 2026, no member state has completed full nationwide transposition.

Poland moved first and fastest. Since 24 December 2025, the Labour Code requires salary ranges in job ads, bans salary-history questions, and mandates gender-neutral job titles. Polish truck driver job ads that say "attractive salary, details discussed at interview" are already illegal. A full penalty framework — fines up to PLN 50,000, roughly €10,400 — is expected to enter force on the EU deadline date.

Malta enacted a partial transposition in August 2025, covering pre-employment pay disclosure and the employee right to pay information. Ireland passed a General Scheme going further than the directive — salary ranges must appear in the advert, not merely before interview — but the bill is not yet law, and the government has conceded a phased rollout. France has a draft in parliamentary consultation that imposes fines of €450 per non-compliant advert and potential public-tender exclusion for repeat offenders, but it will not be law before late 2026. Germany has no bill yet. Sweden pulled its draft entirely in March 2026, declared the directive burdensome, and asked for EU-level renegotiation.

The Netherlands is the clearest case study in what non-compliance looks like at national level: the government formally delayed implementation to 1 January 2027, and the European Commission formally rejected that postponement in December 2025, warning of infringement proceedings under Article 258 TFEU. Dutch employers are now in a gap where the directive applies but national enforcement machinery does not yet exist.

The practical implication for transport companies operating across borders is to design your job-ad template against the strictest likely standard — Ireland and France's in-advert disclosure requirement — rather than the minimum. A template built to that standard is compliant everywhere. A template built to the German minimum leaves you exposed in Dublin and Paris.

The per-diem trap nobody is talking about

One thing that makes trucking uniquely exposed to this directive is the per diem — the daily allowance that most drivers on long-haul routes receive to cover food and accommodation away from base.

The CJEU's Rapidsped judgment of July 2021 settled something that fleet operators have been quietly hoping to avoid: a flat daily allowance that does not reimburse documented actual expenses is part of the worker's pay, not a tax-free expense reimbursement. It counts towards minimum wage obligations. It is remuneration.

Under the Pay Transparency Directive, "pay" covers all cash and non-cash consideration — including those allowances. That means the per diem on your driver's payslip is not a separate administrative item you can omit from the salary disclosure. If a Lithuanian CE driver earns €1,800 base and €600/month in flat daily allowances, the honest pay-transparency disclosure is €2,400 in total remuneration — and the ad needs to be clear about how those components are structured.

This matters because many carriers in Eastern and Central Europe have structured pay to maximise the allowance component for tax efficiency. Under the directive, that structure is now visible. The pay transparency directive job ad salary section cannot hide what the payslip reveals.

What a compliant truck driver job ad template looks like in 2026

A defensible vacancy for a CE driver in 2026 contains six elements that most current job ads do not have.

It opens with a gender-neutral job title — "CE Driver (m/f/d)" in German, "kierowca/kierowczyni C+E" in Polish, "Chauffeur·euse poids lourd" in French. Then it states a monthly gross base salary range with the bottom and top figures drawn from objective criteria: licence held, Code 95 validity, ADR qualification if required, years of experience.

Below the base, it itemises the variable components: kilometre bonus or route bonus rate, night and weekend supplements, per-diem treatment (with a clear note on whether the allowance is reimbursive and how it is documented, or flat and part of pay). It cites the applicable collective agreement — ver.di Tarifvertrag Logistik in Germany, CCN Transports routiers in France, the relevant national CBA elsewhere. It includes a one-line posted-driver disclosure: for cabotage and cross-trade routes, host-country minimum remuneration rates apply under Directive (EU) 2020/1057.

And it contains no question about current or previous salary — not in the application form, not in the opening screening call.

That is the truck driver job ad template 2026. It is longer than "competitive pay, modern fleet, apply now." But it is what drivers will increasingly filter on, and what labour inspectorates will check first.

76% of employers are not ready. That is an opportunity.

Littler's 2025 European Employer Survey, covering 400-plus employers across the EU, found that only 24% describe themselves as "very prepared" for the Pay Transparency Directive. Three weeks before the deadline, that number has not meaningfully moved.

In logistics and transport, the real number is probably lower. Office-based employers at least have clean salary bands — a fixed annual figure for a software engineer is easy to disclose. A driver's total remuneration across a month of mixed local, bilateral, and cabotage work is not. The variable structure of trucking pay, the interaction with the Mobility Package, the per-diem question, the multi-country exposure — these are complications that a generic HR compliance checklist does not address.

The gap between what the law requires and what the market is currently doing is where the opportunity sits. Transport companies that write clean, compliant, fully itemised driver job ads from June 2026 will look materially different from competitors still posting vague ranges or no figures at all. In a market where drivers filter offers on transparency — and where referral platforms like CE.D surface ads to drivers already in the industry who know exactly what competitive pay looks like — a well-structured pay section is not a legal box-tick. It is a recruitment advantage.

What to do this week

The three actions that matter most before 7 June 2026 are straightforward even if executing them is not.

First, pull every active driver vacancy and check whether it contains a salary range. If it does not, rewrite it. Use the strictest standard — range in the ad, not merely before interview — and apply it universally across all markets. The Polish rules are already in force; the Irish and French rules are coming.

Second, run a per-diem audit. Determine whether your daily allowances are reimbursive (documented actual expenses) or flat (part of pay under Rapidsped). Whichever they are, decide how to present them in the pay disclosure. Do not leave them out.

Third, map your driver categories on gender-neutral grounds — local, regional CE, long-haul, ADR, intermodal — using objective criteria: licence, responsibility, effort, working conditions. This is not just for the job ad. It is the foundation of the 2027 gender pay gap report you will be building from 2026 data. Starting the categorisation now means the report next year is an exercise in arithmetic, not a crisis.

The directive is here. The enforcement is uneven and in several countries still months away. But the drivers reading your job ad already know what they earn, and they will know whether your posted range is honest. Getting this right is not about compliance. It is about credibility.