What U.S. Employers Actually Put On The Table Beyond Salary

Pay transparency has trained candidates to fixate on the salary band. The real story is the rest of the package, and it’s a lot stranger than the headlines suggest.

We parsed every active U.S. job posting in our market census this April, 1,023,179 of them, and pulled out every non-salary compensation signal we could find: bonus, commission, equity, 401(k) match, tuition, relocation, commuter, wellness, childcare, ESPP, pension, and more. Then we sliced the result by the industry and discipline doing the hiring.

Three things became obvious. Most employers still don’t mention perks at all. The ones that do tend to mention several at once. And every industry has a distinctive fingerprint, the same way every cuisine has a distinctive set of spices.

The Top-Line Numbers

Signal frequency, ranked

The single most-disclosed non-salary signal is the 401(k) match. The least common things in this list (childcare, meal stipends, HSA contribution) sit so far below the rest of the field that even calling them rare feels generous.

How postings stack their perks

Inside the 17.2% of postings that disclose anything, perks rarely travel alone. The chart below shows how many distinct compensation buckets each posting touches. Five buckets means a single posting cited bonus, commission, equity, 401(k) match, and a financial perk in the same listing.

Industry Fingerprints

Five industries (technology, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, financial services) account for over three-quarters of the postings in our census, and four-fifths of the disclosed perks. The table below is a heat map of disclosure rate by industry across the major signals. Read it left-to-right and you can see what each sector is competing on.

The same data, expressed as a lift index against the market average, shows where each industry over-indexes (green) or under-indexes (red). A 1.0 means the industry matches the market rate. A 10.6× means defense and aerospace mention relocation assistance ten times as often as the typical posting.

Defense and aerospace is the most distinctive sector in the dataset. It over-indexes 10.6× on relocation, 3.6× on bonus, 2.6× on 401(k) match, and 2.1× on equity. That’s the cleanest signal of physical-presence-required hiring with an old-school structured comp package.

A few other things worth flagging:

• Financial services is the only sector where bonus, commission, and equity are all over-indexed at the same time. Closest the modern labor market has to a true Wall Street stack.
• Technology dominates equity (2.3× lift) and commission (also 2.3×, on the back of large enterprise sales orgs), but it sits below market on 401(k) match and tuition. Tech competes on upside, not stability.
• Healthcare leads on 401(k) match (1.6×) and tuition (1.45×). The structural compensation tools of unionized and large-system employers.
• Retail and hospitality rely on tuition and match. Bonus and equity are scarce. Retail is at 0.33× bonus, hospitality at 0.18× tuition.

Discipline Tells A Different Story

Industry sets the perimeter. Discipline sets the shape. A nurse at a hospital and a sales rep at a SaaS vendor see almost mirror-image compensation packages, even when the parent industries look superficially similar. Below is the same heat map, this time by discipline.

• Healthcare clinical (108,741 postings) is the largest single discipline and the most consistent on 401(k) match (15.8%) and tuition (8.3%). Equity is essentially absent.
• Sales and business development (82,229) is the only non-engineering discipline where equity (4.7%) is material. Commission disclosure tops the chart at 11.1%.
• Software engineering (78,991) leads on equity at 5.6% and posts the highest white-collar relocation rate at 2.4%.
• Customer service (79,320) leans on tuition (3.3%) and match (5.2%) almost exclusively. Variable comp is virtually invisible.
• Engineering hardware (30,896) is the second-most relocation-heavy discipline at 5.4%, reflecting on-site fabrication and lab work.

The Equity Story Is More Nuanced Than You Think

After resolving subtypes, 34,125 postings disclose some form of equity. The distribution is striking. ESPP, the public-company employee stock purchase plan, is now the single most common equity vehicle in the labor market by posting count. Stock options come second, RSUs third.

That balance changes dramatically by industry. Tech is the only sector with a balanced RSU + Options + ESPP stack, characteristic of late-stage and public software employers. Retail equity is almost entirely ESPP (3,475 of 4,113 postings), which is disclosure of a public-company stock plan, not founder-style upside. Defense skews toward "mixed" grants and options, reflecting government-prime contractor structures.

The Numbers Behind The Words

The hardest field to extract is also the most useful one: an actual percent or dollar figure. Most postings say "bonus eligible" or "401(k) match" without telling you how much. Inside the subset of postings that do publish a number, the medians look reasonable and the distributions are tight.

The 401(k) match number is the cleanest signal in the entire study. When employers do publish the figure, it’s almost always the classic safe-harbor tier. That’s the IRS-defined minimum that lets a plan sponsor skip annual nondiscrimination testing, and it’s become the de facto market norm.

What This Says About Q2 2026

1. Disclosure is a moat, and it’s narrowing. 17.2% of postings now name a non-salary signal as state pay-transparency laws expand. The competitive question for employers is no longer whether to disclose, but which two or three signals to lead with.
2. The "equity job market" is bigger than tech. ESPP showing up in 12,554 postings (3,475 in retail, 1,591 in healthcare, 1,379 in manufacturing) means public-company stock-plan disclosure is now industry-agnostic. Founder-style stock options remain a tech and finance phenomenon.
3. Healthcare is the structured-comp anchor. 15.8% of clinical postings cite a 401(k) match and 8.3% cite tuition reimbursement. That is the highest combined rate of any large discipline. Healthcare wins on stable, defensible benefits, not upside.
4. Defense and aerospace is the relocation outlier. 10.6× the market’s relocation disclosure rate, combined with 2.6× lift on 401(k) match and 3.6× lift on bonus. Most clearly "moving for the package" sector in the dataset.
5. Childcare and meal stipends are still vapor. Childcare appears in 0.34% of postings, meal stipends in 0.14%. Despite the press attention on family benefits, the labor market doesn’t advertise them yet.

If you’re benchmarking an offer, salary is the cover charge. The next two or three signals are the actual delta between two competing roles, and they are deeply structured by what industry and discipline you’re sitting in.

Methodology. Source: JobsJudo Compensation Intelligence, run against the live U.S. job posting census on April 27, 2026. 1,023,179 active postings analyzed. 989,514 carry an industry classification and 1,007,641 carry a discipline classification under the JobsJudo standard taxonomy. Signal extraction is deterministic for presence and absence; numeric value extraction is a separate phase, which is why the value-bearing samples (bonus percent, match percent, OTE) are smaller than the presence counts. Equity subtype is resolved against language patterns (RSU, stock options, ESPP, mixed, unspecified). "Lift" metrics divide industry disclosure rate by the market-wide rate.