Delaware pay transparency law: the 2027 effective date and the salary range rules for job postings

The Act does not print its own effective date. Section 2 of House Substitute No. 2 for House Bill No. 105 says only that "This Act takes effect 2 years after its enactment into law." Everything then turns on what counts as enactment, and that is where published summaries diverge.

The bill passed the Delaware Senate on June 30, 2025. It was not signed until September 26, 2025, almost three months later. Add two years to the wrong one of those two dates and you get June 30, 2027, which is why that date circulates. Enactment into law happens on the Governor's approval, and the printed session law closes with the line "Approved September 26, 2025."

You do not have to take that reading on trust, because the Delaware Code Revisor has already done the arithmetic in the statute book. The codified section is headed "§ 709C. Transparency in pay rates, employment, and advancement opportunities [Effective Sept. 26, 2027]", and where the enrolled bill wrote a bracketed placeholder in subsection (i), the codified text substitutes the literal date September 26, 2027. That is the state's own publication of the answer, and it settles it.

Two years is a long runway, and it is worth being blunt about what it is for. Delaware did not give employers two years to redraft their job ad template, which takes an afternoon. It gave them two years because the range you post has to be defensible under a good faith standard, and most companies under 200 people do not yet have the pay structure that makes a range defensible.

Section 709C(h) states the threshold twice, from both directions. Paragraph (h)(1) says the section "does not apply to an employer with 25 or fewer employees." Paragraph (h)(2) then frames the same line positively: "For an employer with 26 or more employees, this section applies to jobs located in Delaware and non-international remote positions offered by an employer based in Delaware." There is no gap between the two and no ambiguity about where the line sits.

Where the line came from is more interesting than where it landed. The original House Bill 105 excluded only employers "with 10 or fewer employees" and took effect one year after enactment. The enacted substitute more than doubled the exclusion and doubled the delay. If a summary you are reading says Delaware covers employers of 11 or more, or says the law arrives in 2026, it is describing a bill that was set aside in June 2025.

The definition of "employer" is borrowed rather than written. Section 709C(a)(1) says employer "means as defined in § 709A of this title," and § 709A(a)(4) defines it as any person or group of persons acting directly or indirectly in the interest of an employer in relation to an employee or applicant, "including the State and any political subdivision or board, department, commission, or school district thereof, and excluding the United States government." Delaware public employers are therefore inside the section by definition, and this is the single most commonly missed fact about the law. A Delaware school district or county board over the headcount line posts ranges from September 2027. A federal agency operating in Delaware does not.

One question the text leaves genuinely open: whether the 25 are counted in Delaware or company wide. Section 709C imports only the employer definition from § 709A, not that section's separate definition of "employee" as an individual employed within the State. Subsection (h)(1) then says "an employer with 25 or fewer employees" with no geographic qualifier of its own. The Department of Labor is authorized to write regulations, but the only rulemaking the section expressly invites concerns temporary and interim postings. Until that is resolved, counting company wide is the cautious reading, and it is the one that matches how Delaware wrote the remote provision in the very next paragraph. It is worth noting that legislatures do write the geographic limit down when they intend one: Minnesota's threshold reaches an employer with 30 or more employees at one or more Minnesota sites, in those words. Delaware's (h)(1) carries no equivalent phrase.

The disclosure duty appears twice, in slightly different words, and the difference is worth knowing. Subsection (b)(1) says an employer who announces, posts, or otherwise makes known a job opportunity "must include the hourly or salary compensation range and a general description of the benefits and other compensation." Subsection (c)(1)a is broader on the pay side: it requires "the hourly or salary compensation or the hourly or salary compensation range." Read together, a fixed rate is a lawful disclosure where the pay genuinely is a single number, which is the sensible outcome for a role paid at one posted rate.

The benefits half is not optional and it is not a footnote. Delaware puts "a general description of the benefits and other compensation" in the operative sentence in both places. A posting that carries a perfectly sourced salary band and says nothing about benefits has satisfied half of the requirement. Most states that require anything at all about benefits treat it more loosely than this, so a national job ad template built for Colorado or New York will not clear Delaware without an edit.

The commission carve-out is wider than the equivalent in most states, and the drafting is the reason. Delaware exempts a job paid on a commission basis "whether in whole or in part." Maine, by contrast, only excuses a job compensated solely on commission, so a Maine base plus commission posting still needs a range. Run the same sales job in both states and the Delaware ad can decline to state a number where the Maine ad cannot.

There is a small drafting seam in the temporary hire exemption. Subsection (b)(3) exempts temporary, interim and acting roles that require an immediate hire "from the requirement of paragraph (b)(1)," while the itemized disclosure list sits in subsection (c). On a strict reading that leaves (c) untouched for those roles. Nothing suggests the General Assembly meant to write a half exemption, and the Department has room to fix it by regulation, but if you rely heavily on interim hiring it is worth watching for the rules rather than assuming a clean exclusion.

Plenty of states say a range must be posted in good faith and leave you to guess what that means. Delaware names four reference points in the definition itself. Section 709C(a)(2) defines the hourly or salary compensation range as "the minimum to maximum pay range for the position, set in good faith by reference to any applicable pay scale, previously determined range for the position, the actual range of others currently holding equivalent positions, or the budgeted amount for the position, as applicable."

Those four anchors are a checklist for defending a number, and they are ordered from strongest to weakest evidence. A documented pay scale is the best answer. The budgeted amount is the fallback for a role you have never filled. If you cannot point to any of the four, you have not set a range in good faith, you have picked one.

Then Delaware adds a sentence that only two states have. Under § 709C(c)(1)a, "the breadth of the hourly or salary compensation range provided is one factor relevant to the analysis of whether an employer has complied in good faith with this section." A range of $40,000 to $250,000 technically contains the truth, and this sentence is what makes it evidence against you. Note what the sentence does not do: it sets no numeric cap, so there is no safe percentage. Width is a factor weighed against your four anchors, which means a wide band is defensible exactly when you can show it reflects a genuinely wide scale.

If you hire across those four states, the practical consequence is that one band satisfies all of them and four separately invented numbers satisfy none. The narrowest constraint governs, and in Delaware and Virginia the constraint is not the number itself, it is whether you can show your work. That is the same problem as building salary bands with a documented method, arriving with a compliance deadline attached.

Subsection (c)(1) requires disclosure "in the notification of each job opportunity in both internal and external job postings." Internal is not an afterthought here, it is written into the operative clause. From September 2027 a Delaware employer over the line cannot post an internal promotion or a lateral transfer without the range and the benefits description.

This is where pay transparency laws stop being a job ad problem and become a compensation problem. External ranges are read by strangers. Internal ranges are read by the people already doing the work, who can compare the posted band for the job above them against what they are paid today. Any inconsistency you have been carrying quietly gets published to the audience most able to spot it, which is the standard mechanism behind pay compression complaints in the months after a transparency law lands.

There is a second duty for jobs that never get a posting at all. Under (b)(2), where an external or internal posting has not been made available to an applicant, the employer must provide the range and the benefits description "prior to any offer or discussion of compensation and at any time at the applicant's request." Direct sourcing, referrals and executive search do not sidestep the section. They just move the disclosure from the ad to the first conversation about money.

Subsection (f) supplies the one privacy limit: nothing in the section requires an employer to identify a selected candidate in a manner that violates their privacy rights under applicable law, or that would put their health or safety at risk.

Almost every summary of this law reports the penalty as $500 to $10,000. That is accurate as far as it goes and it leaves out the first sentence of the paragraph. Section 709C(e)(2) reads: "For a first offense, an employer shall receive a written warning. For any second or subsequent offense, an employer is subject to a civil penalty of not less than $500 nor more than $10,000 for each such violation."

A first offense costs nothing in money. What it costs is the warning itself, because every posting after that one sits in the priced tier. Delaware has built a structure where the expensive failure is not the mistake, it is failing to fix it, and the two year runway is the state telling you in advance that it expects the fix to be systematic.

The same paragraph closes with a counting rule that materially changes the exposure math: "An employer's failure to comply with this section for 1 job opportunity is 1 violation regardless of the number of times it is posted." Syndicating one non-compliant requisition to eight job boards is one violation, not eight. That matters because the modern hiring stack republishes automatically, and in a state that counted per posting a single template error could multiply without anyone touching a keyboard. Delaware closed that door, and paired it with (g)(2), which says an employer is not liable for postings digitally replicated and published without its consent.

The retaliation provision is the one place the graduated structure does not apply. Discharging or discriminating against someone who complained, gave information to the Department, started proceedings or testified draws the full $500 to $10,000 range immediately, per act. There is no written warning tier in (e)(3), and the omission is clearly deliberate given that (e)(2), the paragraph directly above it, has one.

Enforcement is administrative from end to end. Under § 709C(e)(1)a the Department of Labor administers and enforces the section, may investigate suspected violations, and adjudicates alleged violations through administrative proceedings. The Department is directed to adopt regulations establishing those procedures, and the regulations must require the Secretary of Labor to issue a written final order whenever a penalty is imposed and to give prompt notice.

The appeal route is deliberately narrow. A party aggrieved by a final order appeals to the Superior Court within 30 days of notice, and the statute states plainly that the appeal "shall be on the record without a trial de novo." If the court finds the record insufficient it remands rather than retrying the facts, and where factual determinations are at issue it must "take due account of the Department's experience and specialized competence." Absent actual fraud, review is limited to whether the decision was supported by substantial evidence on the record.

Read practically, that means the hearing before the Department is the hearing. You do not get a second look at the facts in court, so the documentation supporting your posted range has to exist at the time you post it, not be assembled once a complaint arrives. If penalties go unpaid after appeal or after the appeal window closes, the Department can file in Superior Court to execute on the Secretary's order as though it were a judgment.

What the section does not contain is a private right of action. There is no provision letting an applicant or employee sue an employer directly for a posting violation, and no damages formula. That is a meaningful contrast with several other transparency states and it shapes the realistic risk: the exposure is a regulator with a penalty schedule, not class litigation.

Section 709C(h)(2) draws the geographic line in one sentence: the section applies "to jobs located in Delaware and non-international remote positions offered by an employer based in Delaware." Two categories, and the second one is the surprise.

Colorado and Washington built their remote reach around the worker: a role that could be performed in the state pulls the posting into the rules regardless of where the company sits. Delaware built its remote reach around the company. A remote position is covered when the employer offering it is based in Delaware. A Texas company hiring a fully remote engineer who happens to live in Wilmington is not obviously within (h)(2) on the text, because the position is not located in Delaware and the employer is not based there.

The word "non-international" does real work in the other direction. A Delaware based employer posting a remote role open to candidates anywhere in the United States is covered by the section for that posting, which in practice means a Delaware headquartered company ends up posting ranges nationally. The exclusion is only for roles that are genuinely international.

Delaware is a state where a very large number of companies are incorporated and a much smaller number are actually based, and the statute says "based in," not "incorporated in." A Delaware corporation headquartered in California is not turned into a Delaware employer by its certificate of incorporation. If you run remote roles across state lines, the interaction with every other state's rules is worked through in remote job salary range requirements.

Section 709C(d) requires an employer to "make, keep, and preserve records of job descriptions and salary or wage rate history for each employee for a period of not less than 3 years" and to make those records available to the Department of Labor on request. Two details in that sentence get skipped.

The first is that the record covers job descriptions, not only pay. A payroll export answers half of it. The section wants the description of the job alongside the wage rate history, which is what lets a regulator ask whether two people doing equivalent work were paid inside the same range. The second is "history": a current salary figure is not a history, so a system that overwrites the old number on every raise is not producing the record the section asks for.

Notice also that (d) has no headcount qualifier written into it, but it sits inside a section that (h)(1) switches off entirely for employers with 25 or fewer employees. Delaware drafted the exclusion at section level, so a 20 person Delaware employer has no records duty under 709C. That is the opposite of how Maine wrote the same pairing, where the record duty sits in a subsection with no threshold and reaches every employer regardless of size. Same two duties, two different drafting choices, and it is worth checking which pattern applies before you scope a records project across states.

Delaware handles union covered roles with a two part mechanism that no other state copies exactly. First, the content rule: under (c)(2)c a notification for a job covered by a collective bargaining agreement must disclose the compensation or range "that has been approved for disclosure under this section in the collective bargaining agreement." The number comes out of the agreement, and the parties decide together what gets published.

Second, the timing rule in subsection (i): the section applies to postings for CBA covered opportunities "only after the collective bargaining agreement is executed, amended, modified, renewed, or replaced after September 26, 2027." An agreement signed in 2026 and running to 2030 keeps its covered postings outside the section until it is reopened.

The reason given during passage was to let the parties negotiate the disclosed range rather than have one imposed mid-term. For an employer with a mixed workforce the practical effect is a split: your non-union postings comply from day one and your union postings phase in at the pace of your bargaining calendar. That is a compliance calendar worth writing down now, because it is driven by contract expiry dates that have nothing to do with the statute.

September 2027 sounds distant. The work that has to happen before then is not the job ad, it is the structure behind the number, and that takes longer than people expect because it surfaces problems rather than solving them.

1. 1. Settle the headcount question early. If you are anywhere near 26, decide now whether you are counting Delaware employees or everyone, and write down the reasoning. The cautious answer is company wide.
2. 2. Build a range you can trace to one of the four anchors. Pay scale, previously determined range, actual range of others in equivalent positions, or budgeted amount. A number nobody can source is the definition of a bad faith range.
3. 3. Look at your internal postings first, not last. They are covered, and they are read by the people best placed to notice a band that does not match what they are paid.
4. 4. Add benefits language to the template. The general description of benefits and other compensation is required in the same sentence as the pay figure.
5. 5. Fix the records system before it matters. Three years of job descriptions and wage rate history, with history meaning the sequence and not the latest value.
6. 6. Map your CBA expiry dates. Union covered postings phase in as agreements are renewed, so your compliance date for those roles is a contract date.

Steps two and three are the same project. A defensible posted range and an internal band that survives being read by your own team are one artifact, built once from market data with a method you can explain. That is what putting salary ranges in job postings turns into once a statute is attached to it, and the underlying wage data is covered in BLS salary data.

If you hire beyond Delaware, the thresholds differ but the answer converges on one set of bands. Start with the pay transparency laws by state overview. The two states whose good faith drafting is closest to Delaware's are Virginia and, for the contrast that shows what Delaware added, Maine. The number itself is worked through step by step in choosing the salary range format for a Delaware job posting, and how wide the band should be is covered in how wide a salary range should be.