The weighted-average salary disclosure rate across 20 AI industry sectors stands at 37 percent in August 2026 — the closing figure for Salary Transparency Month and the first edition of ENTRA's sector-level disclosure index. That 37 percent hides a range of 47 points: from E-Commerce / Retail AI at 62 percent, where Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Shopify collectively cover most of their AI hiring volume under US state mandate jurisdictions, to Semiconductor / Hardware AI at 15 percent, where NVIDIA, AMD, and the emerging AI-chip ventures treat compensation data as proprietary intelligence and recruit almost entirely through professional networks. The index's headline finding is not the weighted average but what sits on either side of it: the sectors with the highest market power, the greatest public scrutiny, and the most active talent competition are systematically the least transparent about what they pay.
The transparency inversion is the structural fact this index is designed to document. Frontier AI Labs — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, xAI — score nineteenth at 32, with an 18 percent disclosure rate that represents the second-lowest in the edition. Big Tech / Platform AI scores eighteenth at 38, with a +1 percentage-point year-over-year improvement that is the slowest in the index. These are the employers that generate the most public discussion about AI compensation, that pay the highest total compensation in the index, and whose salary data is most aggressively crowdsourced on Levels.fyi precisely because it is not published proactively. The crowdsourcing fills the gap only imperfectly: Levels.fyi covers a self-selected sample of candidates who accepted offers and chose to submit data — it cannot capture systematic patterns in who negotiates, who accepts below-midpoint offers, or how compensation differs by demographic group. Proactive band posting resolves those asymmetries. E-Commerce at the top of this index does. Semiconductor at the bottom does not.
Three findings from this edition carry direct implications for candidates and employers navigating AI hiring in Q3–Q4 2026. First, the HealthTech surprise: HealthTech / Clinical AI improved its disclosure rate by 22 percentage points year-over-year — the fastest improvement of any sector in the index — through a mechanism that has nothing to do with regulation. HIPAA documentation culture has transferred institutional information-management discipline into compensation documentation, producing proactive disclosure that outpaces legal requirements. Second, the InsurTech edge: InsurTech AI posts the narrowest salary bands of any sector outside the top three — average upper/lower ratio of 1.38 — a consequence of actuarial tradition's role classification granularity. Narrow bands from narrowly defined roles. Third, the AdTech precision paradox: AdTech / MarTech AI's Band Narrowness Score of 20 of 25 coexists with only a 38 percent posting rate. When AdTech AI employers post bands, they post precise bands. The problem is that they post bands only 38 percent of the time. Precision without coverage is not transparency.
The November 2026 refresh will capture the first full quarter of EU Pay Transparency Directive enforcement across member states — the regulatory event most likely to reshape sector standings. Sectors with significant EU employer populations (Frontier AI Labs with Mistral and the European AI safety institutes; Semiconductor / Hardware AI with ASML, Infineon, and emerging European chip ventures; Robotics / Automation with ABB and Fanuc) face mandatory disclosure requirements that will mechanically improve their posting rates independent of any voluntary action. The November edition will also incorporate the first cross-quarter comparison for CA SB 1162 annual reports, producing the first auditable before/after dataset for evaluating whether disclosure mandates narrow the offer spread over time. For the closing index of Salary Transparency Month 2026: the conversation about what AI employers owe candidates in terms of pre-application compensation information is no longer theoretical. Thirty-seven percent of sectors are answering it at or above the index average. Sixty-three percent are not.
How we ranked
The Top 20 AI Industry Sectors by Salary Disclosure Rate — August 2026 Closing Index is scored across 4 dimensions (100 points total):
- Posting Disclosure Rate (40%) — Percentage of AI job postings in this sector that include a salary band. (Source: ENTRA Job Signal Index Q2 2026, n=47,000+ AI postings, June–July 2026)
- Band Narrowness Score (25%) — Tighter bands (upper/lower ratio ≤1.5) score higher; wide bands ("$100K–$400K") score lower. (Source: ENTRA Job Signal Index Q2 2026 sector cohort; Levels.fyi offer corpus Q1–Q2 2026, n=3,800+; ENTRA Salary Survey Q2 2026, n=2,140 practitioners)
- YoY Improvement Score (20%) — Percentage-point improvement in sector posting disclosure rate from Q2 2025 to Q2 2026. (Source: ENTRA Job Signal Index historical cohorts Q2 2025 and Q2 2026; CO CDLE enforcement reports through July 2026; CA CRD SB 1162 annual reports August 2026)
- Cross-Jurisdiction Consistency (15%) — Whether employers in this sector post salary bands in all jurisdictions, not only CO/CA/NY where required. (Source: ENTRA Job Signal Index geo-tagged postings Q2 2026; EU Pay Transparency Directive compliance audit, ENTRA July 2026, n=380 EU postings across 8 member states)
Data window: ENTRA Job Signal Index Q2 2026 (April 1 – June 30, 2026, posting audit); CO CDLE enforcement reports through July 2026; CA CRD SB 1162 annual reports August 2026; EU Pay Transparency Directive compliance audit July 2026 Sample size: 47,000+ AI job postings across 20 sector families (ENTRA Job Signal Index Q2 2026); 2,140 ENTRA Salary Survey Q2 2026 verified respondents; 380 EU-posted AI roles audited for Pay Transparency Directive compliance (July 2026) Sector assignment: Each posting assigned to sector by ENTRA's ML classification model trained on O*NET 2025 taxonomy. Postings from the same employer may span multiple sectors if roles are distinct. Rating bands: 90–100 AAA · 80–89 AA · 70–79 A · 60–69 BBB · 50–59 BB · below 50 B First edition: August 2026. All YoY delta = NEW. Q3 2026 refresh planned for November 2026.
Limitations:
- Private companies not indexed on Levels.fyi may be under-represented in Band Narrowness Score; sectors dominated by private employers (Frontier AI Labs, Robotics / Automation) may carry slightly understated narrowness scores
- Sector assignment follows ENTRA's ML classification model trained on O*NET 2025 taxonomy; postings from diversified employers spanning multiple sectors may be attributed to the posting's primary functional area
Note: entryType for this index is "role" — rows are static. No company hub links are generated. The company field in all entries is intentionally blank.
Inquiries about methodology: methodology@entracareers.com
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