Best pay range to post in a Maine job posting
Post the range you would actually pay the person you hire, referenced to one of the four points Maine's statute names, and write down which one you used on the day you posted. That is the whole method. Maine does not test whether your range was set in good faith and it does not test how wide it is. It asks a plainer and more factual question: is this the range you anticipate relying on in setting wages for the position?
Since July 29, 2026, an employer with 10 or more employees has to put a prospective range of pay in every posting. The Maine pay transparency law carries a fine of $100 to $500 per violation, and per violation means per posting, so the arithmetic scales with how many requisitions you are running rather than with how badly you got any one of them wrong.
Maine's standard is not good faith, and that changes your answer
If you have read that Maine requires a good faith range of a defensible width, you have read a description of Virginia. The two laws took effect four weeks apart in the summer of 2026 and most firms wrote a single client alert covering both, so Virginia's vocabulary has spread across the Maine coverage. It is worth being precise about, because the two standards point at different evidence.
Virginia Code § 40.1-28.7:12 imposes a good faith duty and directs that the analysis consider the breadth of the range. That makes width itself a fact in issue. Maine's § 622-A(1)(B) instead defines the range of pay as "the range of pay that an employer anticipates relying on in setting wages for a position." No good faith, no breadth, and no definition of the range as a minimum and a maximum.
The practical difference is what a challenge looks like. Under a good faith standard you are defending your process. Under Maine's wording you are defending a prediction against your own subsequent conduct: you said this was the range you expected to rely on, and then you hired somebody. If the offer sat inside the range, the prediction held. If it did not, the posted range was not the one you relied on, and the words of the statute do the rest without needing any concept of sincerity.
Which of the four reference points to use
The statute lists four things a range may refer to, prefaced by "including, but not limited to." That preface matters and it is routinely dropped in summaries. The four are examples, not a closed menu, so a market band built from published wage data is not excluded by anything in the section. Still, picking one of the named four is the cheapest way to make the question boring, because you are then pointing at language the legislature wrote.
| Reference point | Use it when | Keep on file |
|---|---|---|
| An applicable pay scale | You already run bands or grades and the role maps to one | The grade, its minimum and maximum, and the date it was priced |
| A previously determined range for the position | You hired this exact role recently and nothing has moved | The prior requisition and the range it carried |
| Actual wages of people currently in equivalent positions | You have two or more incumbents doing the same work | The lowest and highest current base pay in that group |
| The budgeted amount for the position | First-time hire, no incumbent, no prior range | The approved budget line and who approved it |
The third one has a trap in it that is worth naming, because it is the anchor small employers reach for first. If your two incumbents are paid $52,000 and $71,000 for the same work, the actual range is $52,000 to $71,000 and posting it is compliant. It is also an advertisement that you have a 37 percent spread between two people doing one job, which is the kind of thing that starts a different conversation. Using the incumbent anchor honestly sometimes surfaces a pay compression problem you would rather have found privately.
How wide, when the statute will not tell you
Maine gives you no number, so use the one the underlying pay practice gives you. A normal band is built around a market midpoint with a spread on either side, and for individual contributor roles that spread is conventionally 30 to 40 percent from minimum to maximum. That is not a legal rule, it is just how the ranges you are referring to are actually constructed.
Work an example. Say your market midpoint for the role lands at $68,000 and you want a 30 percent spread. The minimum is $59,130 and the maximum is $76,870, which averages back to $68,000 and is a 30 percent spread measured from the minimum, the way range spread is conventionally quoted. Post that, and every offer you are realistically going to make sits inside it. Post $45,000 to $110,000 for the same role and you have said something about your intentions that is not true, which is the exact thing Maine's wording tests.
The failure mode to avoid is treating width as insurance. A wide range does not buy you room, it just moves the problem: the wider it is, the less plausible it is as the range you anticipated relying on, and the more useful it is to somebody arguing you did not have a range at all. If you are unsure where the midpoint sits, the fix is better data rather than a bigger interval. Our salary bands guide covers how the spread is set, and how wide a salary range should be goes through the numbers.
Three ways to earn a per-violation fine
Most Maine exposure is not a badly chosen number. It is a posting that carries no statement at all, in a place nobody was looking.
The first is third-party listings. Maine's definition of posting expressly covers recruitment "done directly by an employer or indirectly through a 3rd party." A staffing agency running your req without a range is your violation, on your posting, and the agency contract does not move that. Check what your recruiters actually publish rather than what you sent them.
The second is commission roles. The exclusion for commission-only pay is real but narrow. Where a position is compensated solely on commission you owe no range, but the required statement "must indicate that the compensation for the position is based solely on commission," so silence is still a violation. And "solely" means solely. A base plus commission, a draw, or a guaranteed minimum all take you outside the exclusion and back into owing a range.
The third is printed material. The definition covers postings made "electronically or with a printed hard copy." A card in a window, a flyer at a job fair, a page in a trade publication: each is a posting if it names a specific available position and lists qualifications. Careers pages get fixed on day one and print almost never does.
Write down the five lines that answer the question later
Whatever range you post, the thing that makes it defensible is a short contemporaneous note. Five lines is enough: the position, the range posted, which of the reference points you used, the number that anchor produced, and the date. Attach it to the requisition. It costs a minute and it converts an argument about what you were thinking in September into a document.
This habit also feeds an obligation you have regardless of headcount. Section 622-A(3) states no employee threshold, so every Maine employer has to disclose the range for an employee's own position when asked, and keep a record of each position held and the pay history in each one for three years after that person leaves. An employer with six people has no posting duty and still has that record duty. Answering a request two years after someone left is much easier if the range and its source were written down when the role was filled.
One downstream effect is worth planning for. Once the number is public, candidates self-select against it before they apply, which usually means better-matched applicants and more of them at once, and first-round screening becomes the bottleneck rather than sourcing. That is a happier problem than the one the statute solves, but it does arrive.
The short version
Pick the reference point that fits the role, build a range around a market midpoint with a spread you would really use, post it in every channel including the agency's and the printed ones, and keep five lines on file. Maine will not ask whether you meant well. It will ask whether that was the range you expected to rely on, and your own offer letter is the answer. Full statutory detail, including where the penalty comes from given the Act contains no penalty clause, is on the Maine pay transparency law page, and the multi-state picture is in pay transparency laws by state.