Pay transparency software: compliant salary ranges for teams facing 2026 deadlines

Two regimes matter for most companies. In the EU, Directive 2023/970 must be transposed into member-state law by June 2026, and its reporting duties phase in from 2027. In the US, state posting laws are already in force and expanding. Key milestones as of 2026:

A practical preparation checklist lives in our EU pay transparency directive checklist.

Transparency law does not just ask you to publish a number. It asks you to explain it. When an applicant, works council or regulator asks why a range is what it is, a defensible answer has three parts: a named data source, a documented method from source to band, and consistent application of that method across comparable roles. A range copied from a job board fails all three.

Wagelist is built around that standard: bands derive from public U.S. BLS wage statistics with a published multiplier table for market, seniority and company stage. Nothing is a black box, which is precisely what you want on record. How bands are structured, including percentiles, width and overlap, is covered in our hub on salary bands, and turning one into the public number is covered in salary ranges in job postings.

The spend comparison is straightforward. Traditional compensation surveys run $5,000 to $30,000 per survey and arrive as static files. Enterprise compensation platforms are typically five-figure annual contracts. Wagelist's planned pricing starts at $99 per month, with the full tier table on the pricing page.

The risk side is harder to quantify but larger: posting-law fines reach five figures per violation in several states, and the EU directive shifts the burden of proof in pay discrimination claims toward employers who cannot document their structures. On the upside, postings with credible ranges attract more qualified applicants, and offers anchored to a band close with less negotiation drag. One avoided mis-hire or one retained employee covers years of the subscription.

Compliance tooling has to pass security review. The planned Wagelist Enterprise tier is scoped for compliance-driven organizations of 200 and up:

Wagelist is in early access, so we say planned and mean it. If you are scoping an enterprise rollout ahead of the June 2026 deadline, talk to us directly and we will walk you through the roadmap.

The posting rules are set state by state, and they do not agree with each other. Colorado wants a benefits description and an application deadline. New York keys coverage to where the work is performed. Washington gives you five business days to fix a bad posting. If you hire remotely, you are almost certainly covered by more than one of these at once, which is why remote job postings need a salary range in practice whatever your own state says. Each guide below covers coverage thresholds, what a compliant posting contains, remote-role rules and penalties.