What You Don't Know About Your Salary Is Costing You

One creator is asking strangers what they make. Millions are watching, and it is changing how workers think about pay.

Jadrian Wooten and Salary Transparent Street

Mar 23, 2026

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Here’s a question you probably haven’t thought about in a while: Are you being paid fairly?

You might have a gut feeling. Perhaps you remember what you asked for when you took the job, or vaguely recall reading something on Glassdoor a few years back. But if someone asked you to prove it with real numbers from real people doing comparable work, most of us would come up short.

That’s a feature of how most labor markets in the United States have worked for decades. Wages are one of the most important prices in any economy. Our earnings shape household budgets, career decisions, and how we allocate our time and energy for most of our adult lives. And yet, for most workers, they’re shrouded in secrecy.

Hannah Williams noticed the same thing a few years ago and decided to do something about it. Let’s take a walk together down Salary Transparent Street.

Meet Hannah Williams

Williams is the creator of Salary Transparent Street, a social media project built on a simple premise: ask people what they do for a living, how long they’ve been in that role, and what they earn.

The interviews are short and unscripted. Just a person, their job, and a number.

Since launching the project, she has collected thousands of these conversations. The range of occupations is wide: entry-level service workers, mid-career engineers, nonprofit employees, freelancers, and government contractors. Each one adds a data point to a picture that most workers have never been able to see clearly.

Her videos have reached billions of views across social media. But people aren’t just watching because it’s entertaining. They’re watching because they want to know if they’re being paid what they’re worth.

If you haven’t come across her work yet, it’s worth checking out. Hannah and her partner have made a complex topic feel relatable and actionable for anyone trying to better understand their place in the job market.

The Employer’s Advantage

We want you to pause for a moment and think back to the last time you interviewed for a job. At some point, someone likely asked you what salary you were looking for. You probably had to make your best guess.

You may have looked some data up beforehand, or maybe a friend in the industry gave you a ballpark figure. It’s also completely possible that you just picked a number that felt reasonable and hoped for the best.

The person across the table already knew the answer. Employers typically know the approved range for the role, what current employees are earning, and what previous candidates accepted. You walked in with bits and pieces. They walked in with a spreadsheet.

Economists have a name for this kind of imbalance: information asymmetry. It’s what happens when one side of a transaction knows significantly more than the other. The classic example is used cars. Sellers know the car’s history, but buyers are guessing based on looks. That gap makes it hard to land on a fair price. The same dynamic plays out every time someone negotiates a salary.

When workers don’t know the market rate for a job, employers can end up paying different people different wages for the same work. Economists call this wage dispersion, and it tends to stick around precisely because the information gap does too.

From a firm’s perspective, keeping salaries private makes a lot of sense. It preserves flexibility and keeps labor costs lower than they might otherwise be. From a worker’s perspective, it makes the job market feel like a game where the other side has seen the answer key.

Why Changing Jobs is Harder Than it Looks

There’s another layer here that doesn’t get talked about enough: search costs. These refer to the time, effort, and resources it takes to find the right match in a market. In labor markets, those costs include updating a resume, researching companies, tailoring applications, scheduling interviews, and negotiating offers. The highest cost of all, though, might be uncertainty.

If you don’t know what a role typically pays, you may make a poor estimate of whether it’s even worth applying. Is this company known for underpaying? Would this move represent a step forward in earnings, or a lateral one? Without transparent salary data, those questions are hard to answer.

Transparency reduces that friction. When pay information is accessible, workers can compare opportunities more efficiently. They can identify which industries, companies, or cities offer better compensation. They can spot when a role is offering below-market wages and decide accordingly. The job search becomes less of a shot in the dark.

Transparency also helps workers evaluate compensating differentials. Some jobs pay more because they are genuinely demanding. They may include long hours, physical risk, or high stress. Others pay less because they offer real advantages, like remote flexibility, strong benefits, or meaningful work. Neither of those tradeoffs is obvious without wage data. When workers share their salary alongside details about their job, those tradeoffs become visible.

Final Thoughts

Salary transparency has become a policy question as well as a cultural one. Several states now require employers to post salary ranges in job listings. The intent is good: give workers better information before they apply. But in practice, the results are uneven. Some employers post ranges so wide that they technically comply without telling applicants much. The rule exists, but the useful information still does not.

That’s why the worker-driven transparency Hannah has built through Salary Transparent Street may matter more than any single policy. Instead of waiting for employers to provide information, workers are sharing it themselves.

Labor markets work best when both sides understand the prices involved. When workers know what jobs actually pay, they can negotiate better, choose more wisely, and change jobs without flying blind. That makes the market itself function better.

The next time someone asks what you make, consider answering honestly. The information only has power when people share it.

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