We read 1,377 iGaming job ads. 7% told you the salary.
A census of every open role on the career boards of 20 major iGaming employers. The industry publishes pay for the shop cashier and hides it from the engineer — and the exceptions tell you exactly why.
"Competitive salary" is the most expensive phrase in iGaming. It costs candidates money every year, and it survives because nobody has bothered to measure how common it actually is.
So we measured it. We took the public career boards of 20 major iGaming employers — operators, B2B platforms, studios, affiliates, data suppliers — and read every open ad on them. 1,377 in total. One question each: does this ad say what the job pays?
The answer, and the trap in it
The first number we got was that around one ad in five states a salary. That number is nonsense, and the reason it is nonsense is the most interesting thing in the data.
Look at which ads disclose. One operator's board carries 150-plus roles in its UK betting shops, and nearly all of them state a rate: "Salary is £13.00 per hour." A live-casino supplier lists studio dealers and presenters at "$17-$23/hr". These are hourly, shift-based, frontline jobs — and hourly work publishes its rate almost everywhere, in every industry, because it cannot be hired any other way.
Roll those into the total and iGaming looks like a reasonably open industry. Pull them out and you see the real picture:
- Hourly frontline roles — shop staff, dealers, studio presenters: 61% state a rate. 200 ads out of 328.
- Salaried office roles — engineering, product, data, marketing, compliance, finance: 7%. 74 ads out of 1,049.
The industry will tell you what it pays a betting-shop cashier. It will not tell you what it pays a backend engineer. Any headline that averages those two together is describing something that does not exist.
The exceptions are not a coincidence
A handful of employers do publish pay on salaried roles. We name them in the Pay Transparency Index, and the leaderboard has an obvious shape: the employers at the top are the ones with a serious US footprint.
That is not a story about corporate courage. Several US states — Colorado, New York, California, Washington among them — require a pay range in the job ad. Where the law applies, the range appears. Where it does not, it mostly does not.
Which tells you what "competitive salary" really means. It is not a negotiating position or a data problem. It is a choice, and it evaporates the moment somebody removes the option.
Fourteen of the twenty employers we surveyed did not put a figure on a single one of their 570 salaried ads. Not one.
What this costs you
An employer who knows the band and will not say it is not being coy — they are keeping an information advantage. You open the conversation with a guess; they open it knowing exactly how good your guess is. Every negotiation you have ever had that started with "what are your expectations?" was that advantage being used.
Transparency flips it. When you know that a senior role in your discipline typically lands in a particular band, "competitive" stops working as an answer, and "what are your expectations?" becomes a question you can answer with a number instead of a flinch.
How to protect yourself in the meantime
Until the ads catch up, do the work the ad should have done for you:
- Get your band before you apply. The salary calculator gives the typical monthly and annual range for your discipline and level in remote iGaming, plus the floor and the ceiling.
- Never name the first number. If they will not publish a range, ask for theirs. You are not being difficult; you are asking them to do what a seventh of the industry already does.
- Check the offer against the band, not against your last salary. Your previous employer's opacity should not compound into this one's.
- Treat silence as data. An employer that will not state a range at offer stage is telling you something about how the rest of the relationship will go.
Our own number
We publish this index knowing it points at us too, so: every job on Hirico shows a salary range. Not as a policy anyone can quietly drop — the database rejects a listing without one. 100%, structurally.
That is easy to say when you are small. It is the whole reason the board exists, and it is the only number here we did not have to go and measure.
What we can and cannot see
The figures above are a floor, not a ceiling. We only read the employers' own public career boards; if a company publishes pay somewhere else, we counted it as silent. Detection is text-based — an ad counts only if it puts a real figure next to real pay language, so "competitive salary" scores nothing, as it should. We hand-checked ads from the employers scoring zero to make sure we were not simply failing to see their ranges. We were not.
It is also a snapshot, not a trend. We will re-run it, and the interesting question is whether the 7% moves.