Salary ranges in job postings: which laws require them and what compliant looks like

As of 2026, the following US jurisdictions require compensation information in job postings. Thresholds and details differ, and several states apply the rule to any employer with even one employee in the state, so check the exact statute for your situation. This summary is informational, not legal advice.

Read the last row carefully if you hire in Europe. The June 2026 date is the deadline for member states to write the directive into national law, not the date it took effect for employers, and most of the EU missed it. The obligation arrives country by country, with no headcount threshold once it does, which the EU Pay Transparency Directive page covers state by state.

More states have since joined, including New Jersey since June 2025, Massachusetts since October 2025, Minnesota since January 2025 and Maryland since October 2024 and Washington DC since June 2024, alongside Vermont. Remote roles are the trap: if a posting can be filled from Colorado or California, those rules can reach you even without an office there, which is why remote job postings need a salary range in practice regardless of where you are based. Our state-by-state pay transparency guide tracks the full list. Multi-state hiring pulls in a second set of numbers as well: the Virginia posting rules, where the statute directs that the breadth of the range you publish counts against your good faith, and the exempt salary threshold decides how low the bottom of that posted range can go before the role stops being exempt.

The recurring statutory phrase is good faith: the range you honestly expect to pay for the role at hire. Regulators and candidates both read $30,000 to $300,000 as evasion. Practical guidance that holds up across jurisdictions:

The cleanest source for a good-faith range is your internal band. If you do not have bands yet, start with our hub on salary bands, which covers how to build them from public data.

Note that the range is often not the whole obligation. Colorado, Washington, Maryland and Illinois also require a description of benefits in the posting, and several laws extend to promotional opportunities for existing employees, not just external ads. If you hire through recruiters or job boards, the obligation generally follows the posting wherever it appears, so the range needs to be in the text you hand to third parties too.

Maine now says that in so many words, which is useful when you need to show a recruiter why it matters. Its definition of a posting covers recruitment "done directly by an employer or indirectly through a 3rd party" and reaches postings made "electronically or with a printed hard copy," so an agency listing and a flyer are both yours. The Maine pay transparency law also adds a second condition most laws leave out: a solicitation is only a posting if it names a specific available position and lists qualifications for desired applicants.

Remote postings deserve special care. The safest pattern used by many employers is to include a range whenever a posting could be filled from a covered state, and to publish location-tiered ranges when pay genuinely differs by market. A tiered line such as a Tier-1 metro range next to a US-national range is both compliant and honest, and it heads off the awkward question of why two hires doing the same job saw different numbers.

Wagelist takes the band's P25 and P75, rounds each to the nearest $1,000, and produces a copy-ready snippet for the posting. For a Senior Software Engineer in a Tier-1 metro, the band $165,478 to $267,059 becomes this posting text:

You can produce the same output for around 60 roles right now with the free pay band calculator, built on benchmarks derived from public U.S. BLS wage data.

Penalties are real but rarely ruinous for a first offense. As of 2026, Colorado fines run up to $10,000 per violation, California from $100 to $10,000 per posting, and New York City can reach $250,000 for uncured repeat violations. Washington adds a private right of action, so applicants themselves can sue. Under the EU directive, member states set their own sanctions and the burden of proof in pay discrimination claims shifts toward the employer.

The bigger, quieter cost is credibility: candidates increasingly skip postings without a range, and employees screenshot postings that undercut or embarrass current pay. A defensible range costs minutes to produce and avoids both. For the decision-maker view, including compliance timelines and what enterprise buyers should demand, see pay transparency software.

• Pay transparency software

  The pillar: US and EU obligations and the compliance math.

• Pay transparency laws by state

  The 2026 state-by-state compliance table.

• Salary bands

  Build the band a posted range comes from.

• Compa ratio calculator

  Where a salary sits against its band midpoint.