Pay Transparency Laws in 2026: Which States Require a Salary Range in Your Job Post

For years, leaving pay out of a job posting was standard practice. You'd discuss numbers once you knew the candidate was serious, and there was a reasonable argument for it: you didn't want to anchor low on a great candidate, or scare off a good one who'd have negotiated.

That era is closing. As of August 2026, sixteen states plus Washington, D.C. have pay transparency laws in effect, and the trend is one-directional — more jurisdictions every year, none repealing. Two took effect just this year. Delaware's arrives in 2027.

The part that catches small businesses off guard is the size thresholds. These aren't big-company regulations. New York's law applies to employers with four or more employees. Colorado's and D.C.'s apply to all employers regardless of size. Virginia's, which took effect this July, has no minimum headcount either. If you have a handful of employees and you assumed this was somebody else's compliance problem, it may not be.

A necessary disclaimer: this is a practical overview, not legal advice. These laws change often, they vary in ways that summaries flatten, and several have local ordinances layered on top. Before you rely on any of it, check with your state labor department or an employment attorney. The point of this post is to help you understand the shape of the landscape and ask better questions — not to substitute for someone who knows your specific situation.

Why this is so confusing: there's no federal law

There is no national pay transparency requirement. A federal Salary Transparency Act has been introduced in Congress but hasn't passed.

That absence is exactly why this is a headache. Instead of one rule, you get a patchwork where each state made its own choices about who's covered, what has to be disclosed, when, and what happens if you don't. Some laws only cover employers above a headcount. Some require benefits information alongside pay. Some cover internal promotions as well as external postings. The obligations genuinely differ, and "I read an article about California's law" won't tell you much about your obligations in Ohio.

Where the laws are in effect

Treat this as a starting point for research, not a compliance determination. Effective dates and thresholds get amended, sources disagree on some details, and I've marked the ones I couldn't verify confidently rather than guessing.

Note on Maine: sources disagree on whether the effective date is January or late July of 2026. If you hire in Maine, confirm the current status directly rather than trusting any summary, including this one.

Also worth knowing: some cities have their own ordinances even where the state doesn't. Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, and Toledo all have pay transparency rules despite Ohio having no statewide law. New York City, Ithaca, Westchester County, and Albany County layer additional requirements on top of New York State's. Jersey City has its own on top of New Jersey's. Being outside the sixteen states doesn't automatically mean you're outside all of this.

The distinction that matters most: "in the posting" versus "on request"

Look at the third column again, because this is the single most misunderstood part.

The three oldest laws — Connecticut, Nevada, and Rhode Island — generally don't require a range in the job ad itself. They require you to disclose it at some point in the process: on request, after an interview, or at the point of offer. You can post without a number and still comply.

Nearly everything passed since 2023 works the other way. The range has to be in the posting, before anyone applies. California, Colorado, New York, Illinois, and Washington are the strictest, requiring disclosure in internal postings for promotions and transfers as well as external job ads.

This matters because the older, gentler laws shaped a lot of employers' mental model of what "pay transparency law" means. If your understanding is "I have to tell them if they ask," that's several years out of date in most of the country.

Remote roles can pull you into laws of states you've never operated in

Here's the one that surprises people most.

If a remote job can be performed from a state with a pay transparency law, that state's law generally applies — regardless of where your business is located. A three-person company in Tennessee, a state with no such law, posting a fully remote role open to applicants anywhere in the U.S., has arguably just published a posting subject to Colorado's, New York's, and a dozen other states' requirements simultaneously.

There are two honest ways to handle this:

• Post the range. Then the question is moot everywhere at once. This is what most employers end up doing, because it's the only approach that scales.
• Geographically limit the role. If you exclude covered states, be genuinely prepared to turn down good candidates from them. Most small businesses find this trade isn't worth it — you're shrinking your candidate pool to avoid publishing a number you already know.

💡 On AptiaWork, remote jobs require you to specify the country applicants can work from. That's a Google for Jobs requirement rather than a legal one, but the underlying discipline is the same: knowing exactly who your posting is open to is what makes both compliance and distribution work.

What counts as a "good faith" range

Every one of these laws uses some version of the phrase "good faith," and it's not decorative.

A good faith range means the minimum and maximum you genuinely, actually expect to pay someone hired into that role. Not a legally defensible technicality. Posting "$50,000–$500,000" satisfies the letter of a disclosure requirement while conveying nothing, and regulators have been explicit that this kind of range fails the standard. California's amended law is pointed about ranges needing to reflect real expected compensation, and unusually wide spreads increasingly get flagged.

If you're not sure what your range is, the tests regulators tend to look at are useful for your own thinking: what does your existing pay scale say? What did you pay the last person in this role? What are you actually paying people in equivalent positions right now? What did you budget for this hire? Any of those gets you to a defensible number. If none of them has an answer, that's worth knowing before you start interviewing — it usually means the offer conversation is going to be improvised.

A narrow honest range is better than a wide safe-looking one on every dimension: it's more compliant, it attracts candidates who actually want that number, and it saves you from interviewing people who were never going to accept.

Several states want more than just pay

Pay is the headline, but it isn't always the whole obligation. Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Washington require some description of benefits or other compensation — bonuses, commissions, equity, insurance — not just the base range.

Illinois adds a wrinkle that has nothing to do with pay: if you intend to fill an opening by promotion or transfer, you have to notify current employees of that opening within 14 days of posting it externally. It's easy to miss because it isn't a disclosure rule at all, it's a notification deadline.

Your syndicated copies count as postings too

This is the part most compliance write-ups skip, and it's directly relevant if you distribute your jobs anywhere beyond your own website.

These laws generally cover the posting wherever it appears — your careers page, third-party job boards, recruiting platforms. A copy of your job ad on a partner board is a job posting. It doesn't get a pass for being a copy.

Practically, that means a job posted without a range doesn't create one compliance gap, it creates one everywhere the job travels. AptiaWork syndicates your postings out to partner boards through an XML feed and generates the structured data Google for Jobs reads, which means whatever you enter propagates to every one of those surfaces — including the omissions. Fill the range in once and it's right everywhere. Leave it blank once and it's blank everywhere.

The range helps you even where no law requires it

Set the legal argument aside, because there's a straightforward practical case for posting pay.

Salary is the field candidates filter and sort on. A listing with no number sitting next to three listings with numbers is the easy one to skip — not because candidates assume you pay badly, but because they have no way to tell, and clicking to find out costs them time. You are asking them to spend effort to learn something your competitors told them for free.

There's a distribution dimension too. Pay is part of the structured data Google for Jobs reads, and it only registers as valid when you provide both the numbers and the unit — hourly or yearly. "$20" alone is ambiguous to a machine, and "competitive pay" is nothing at all. A complete range makes your listing eligible for salary-filtered searches; an incomplete one quietly excludes you from them.

So the compliance answer and the performance answer are the same answer, which is a genuinely rare and convenient thing.

The bottom line

You could build a spreadsheet tracking seventeen jurisdictions, their thresholds, their disclosure triggers, and their benefits requirements, then check every job posting against it. Large employers with legal teams do exactly that.

For a small business, that's a bad use of your time, because there's a shortcut that gets you to a better outcome: always post a good-faith pay range, everywhere, regardless of whether you're required to.

You stop needing to know whether a given state covers you. Remote roles stop being a puzzle. You get better-qualified applicants and fewer wasted interviews. Your listings become eligible for salary filters in search. And if you hire across state lines later, or a new law passes in your state, nothing about your process has to change.

The thing employers worry about — losing negotiating room — mostly doesn't materialize. What actually happens is that candidates who'd never have accepted your number stop applying, and the ones who apply are people the number works for.

AptiaWork keeps pay range as a structured field on every job, feeds it into your Google for Jobs listing and out to partner job boards, and shows candidates the number before they apply.

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