Aon’s 2026 Pay Transparency Pulse Survey, fielded from more than 1,000 HR professionals at organizations worldwide, finds a wide gap between employers’ confidence and their actual readiness to defend pay decisions. While 87% of respondents told Aon they could justify their pay decisions if challenged, only 20% have actually handled a real or mock pay transparency request, and just a third have run a pay remediation analysis at all.
Why it matters for HR: pay transparency laws keep expanding, from the EU Pay Transparency Directive to a growing patchwork of U.S. state and local rules, and Aon’s data says most employers are still building the policy layer without the operational layer underneath it. Steve Guyer, Aon’s partner and head of rewards and workforce advisory for North America, framed the gap directly: “It’s not just about checking the compliance box. The real difference comes when transparency is intentionally woven into your overall workforce strategy.” Anthony Poole, Aon’s EMEA human capital sector leader, pointed at the same weak point from the manager side: “Manager conversations are an overlooked factor. Companies need to prepare managers with comprehensive training.”
The original insight is in that manager detail: 84% of organizations in Aon’s survey now identify manager readiness, not policy design or data quality, as their top transparency risk. HR and total rewards teams have largely finished writing the pay transparency policy; what most have not done is rehearsed the conversation a manager has when an employee actually asks about it, and that rehearsal gap is exactly where a compliant policy turns into a mishandled one.
It is a familiar shape for this beat: a state or regional rule creates a paper compliance requirement well before employers build the operational muscle to back it up, the same dynamic HRTech covered with Connecticut’s new public pay code guide requirement.
Source: Aon
