“Breaking down a budget on a specific salary helps viewers set realistic expectations for their money,” said Ang Richard, 25, a career coach who works with a mostly Generation Z clientele.
Hannah Williams, 28, helped spread the #paytransparency hashtag in 2022 with TikTok videos asking random people to share how much they earned.
In her first video on the issue, she discussed what she had earned at every job she ever had.
The video, born of frustration at learning that she had been paid less than her peers as a United States military contractor, immediately garnered over one million views.
“That video going viral really opened my eyes to this being something people want to talk about,” said Williams, who has since founded the company Salary Transparent Street to promote pay transparency.
“Like this conversation is now open. The taboo of talking about finances is starting to lift.”
At most US workplaces, employees have a right to discuss pay with co-workers. But doing so was long considered inappropriate and discouraged.
The trend towards greater sharing of information around money, said Eric Simonson, founder and chief executive of the financial advisory Abundo Wealth, can be traced to millennials who entered the workforce during the Great Recession, when the economy was on shaky ground.
Gen Z, those born roughly between 1997 and 2012, took the trend even further, opening up about money to millions of people on social media.
“Older generations didn’t have the economic pressures that young folks face,” Simonson said.
“They had a pension that could provide potentially a secure retirement, home values were a lot cheaper, and incomes were higher relative to housing prices and living costs.”
Wright said she had become more interested in her finances after hearing her peers talk about high-yield savings accounts and Roth individual retirement accounts.
But it was the personal finance TikTok videos on her algorithm that gave her the tools to make smarter financial choices, she said.
“When I started seeing a lot more pop up on my page, they were so motivating for me to figure out what I was doing with my money now that I’d been a nurse for a while and I was making big-girl money,” she said.
Richard said she saw #paydayroutine and other financial transparency trends as largely positive developments.
“We’re seeing working professionals getting more comfortable discussing their compensation, advocating for pay transparency in job descriptions, and making discussions around money less taboo and secretive,” she said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Kristen Bayrakdarian
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
