Maine pay transparency law: the pay range rules for job postings

Maine's pay transparency duty lives in a brand new section, 26 M.R.S. § 622-A, enacted by LD 54 (H.P. 18) and signed by Governor Mills on April 24, 2026 as Public Law 2025, chapter 771. The posting duty in subsection 2 applies to "an employer that has 10 or more employees." That puts Maine level with New Jersey and well below Massachusetts and Minnesota.

The open question is which employees you count. The statute says "10 or more employees" with no geographic qualifier, so it does not say whether a Boston company with four people in Portland is over or under the line. Compare Colorado, which is explicit that it reaches employers with at least one employee in the state. Maine wrote nothing, and the Department of Labor has not published guidance narrowing it. Counting company-wide is the cautious reading, and it is the one most employment counsel have taken while everyone waits.

If you are near the line, the practical answer is that the cost of complying is a pay range you should be able to produce anyway, and the cost of guessing wrong is a per-violation fine on every posting you ran. That asymmetry is why the company-wide count is the sensible default.

This is the most consequential thing in the statute and the headlines hide it. Section 622-A contains two operative subsections and they are drafted differently on purpose.

Subsection 2 is headed "Employer with 10 or more employees" and its text repeats the threshold: "An employer that has 10 or more employees shall ensure that a posting includes a statement that lists the prospective range of pay." Subsection 3 is headed "Pay disclosure; records" and its text says simply "an employer." No heading threshold, no threshold in the operative words.

When a drafter states a limit twice in one subsection and omits it entirely from the next, that omission is the instruction. The practical result is that a six-person Maine employer has no posting duty at all and still has to disclose the range for a position when the person holding it asks, and still has to keep that person's pay history for three years after they leave. The Maine Department of Labor's own July 20, 2026 announcement describes it the same way: it attaches "10 or more employees" to the advertising requirement, then states the request right and the record requirement without any size language.

There is a second limit inside subsection 3 that runs the other way, and it is narrower than most summaries suggest. The request right belongs to "an employee," for "the position the employee holds." It is not an applicant right, and it is not a right to see the range for a job the person wants next. A candidate cannot use § 622-A(3) to extract a range, and neither can an employee eyeing a promotion.

Maine defines "posting" tightly, and the definition has two cumulative parts. It is a solicitation "that is intended to recruit employment applicants for a specific available position and that includes qualifications for desired applicants." Both have to be true.

That second condition is doing real work and almost nobody mentions it. An evergreen "we are always hiring good people, send us your resume" banner names no specific available position and lists no qualifications, so on the text it is not a posting. Add a job title, a required certification and a list of duties, and you have built both halves of the definition and the pay range obligation attaches. The definition rewards vagueness, which is an odd incentive, but it is what the section says.

The rest of the definition closes the obvious escape routes. It covers "recruitment done directly by an employer or indirectly through a 3rd party," so handing the req to an agency or a job board does not move the duty off you. And it includes "postings made electronically or with a printed hard copy," which reaches a card in a shop window as much as an Indeed listing.

Note what is absent. Unlike Virginia, which expressly covers "each public and internal posting for each job, promotion, transfer, or other employment opportunity," Maine's definition speaks only of recruiting "employment applicants." Whether an internal transfer notice recruits an "applicant" is genuinely arguable, and several early summaries assert flatly that internal postings are covered when the statutory text does not say so. If you post internal openings with qualifications attached, treating them as covered is the safer course, but it is an inference and worth knowing as one.

"Range of pay" means "the range of pay that an employer anticipates relying on in setting wages for a position, including, but not limited to, reference to" four things. The four are an applicable pay scale, a previously determined range of wages for the position, the actual range of wages for those currently holding equivalent positions, or the budgeted amount for the position.

Read the connective words carefully, because they change what the list is. "Including, but not limited to" makes those four illustrative, not exhaustive. Several published summaries present them as the four permitted methods you must choose between. They are examples of what the range may refer to, and a defensible fifth method, such as a market band built from published wage data, is not excluded by anything in the section.

The fourth anchor solves the case employers worry about most. If you have never hired the role, have no incumbent and no prior range, the budgeted amount for the position is enough to build a range from. A first-time hire is not a reason to leave a posting blank.

The right-hand column matters because Maine and Virginia took effect four weeks apart and most law firms wrote one combined client alert about both. Virginia's concepts have leaked into the Maine coverage as a result. Virginia does impose a good faith duty and does direct that the analysis consider the breadth of the range. Maine imposes neither. If you have read that Maine requires a good faith range of a defensible width, you have read a description of Virginia Code § 40.1-28.7:12, and you can check that against our Virginia pay transparency law page. Virginia is not alone on that point any more: the Delaware pay transparency law signed in September 2025 writes the same breadth factor into 19 Del. C. § 709C(c)(1)a, so from September 2027 there are two states where the width of your range is evidence and Maine still is not one of them.

That said, do not read the absence of a width test as permission to post $40,000 to $400,000. The operative standard is the range you "anticipate relying on in setting wages," which is a factual claim about your own pay practice. A range so wide that you plainly do not rely on it is not a compliant range under a loose standard, it is a false statement under a factual one. Maine simply tests it in a different place than Virginia does. The way you satisfy either is the same: pay bands with a method you can show.

The definition of range of pay "does not include compensation that is based solely on commission," and subsection 2 carries the matching carve-out. Where the position is compensated solely on commission, "the required posted statement must indicate that the compensation for the position is based solely on commission."

So the obligation does not disappear, it changes shape. You still owe a statement in the posting; it just says how pay works instead of what it is. Leaving a commission role's posting entirely blank is a violation in the same way as leaving a salaried role blank.

The word "solely" is the limit. A draw against commission, a base plus commission, or a guaranteed minimum all mean the compensation is not based solely on commission, so the carve-out does not apply and you owe a range for the guaranteed component. Sales roles are where employers most often reach for this exception and least often qualify for it.

Subsection 3 requires every employer to "maintain a record of each position held by an employee and the pay history of the employee in each position for the duration of the employee's employment with the employer and for 3 years after the termination of the employee's employment."

Two details in that sentence are easy to skim past. First, the unit is the position, not the person: you need pay history broken out by each position held, so a promotion history has to be reconstructable rather than collapsed into a current salary field. Payroll systems store the latter well and the former badly. Second, the three years run from termination, not from the record's creation, so the retention clock on your longest-serving people has not even started.

Keeping the record is the easy half. Producing it two years after someone left, when an inspector asks and the manager who approved the raise has also gone, is where this fails in practice, and a searchable store of internal records tends to beat a shared folder nobody owns. The same problem of finding an answer buried in internal systems shows up any time a compliance question arrives with a deadline attached.

Note also that § 622-A(3) sits alongside § 622, the existing record section, which already requires a true record of dates and amounts paid and a daily record of time worked, and which makes those records "accessible to any representative of the department at any reasonable hour." The new pay history record joins a body of records the Bureau of Labor Standards can already come and read.

Read LD 54 end to end and you will not find a fine, a damages provision or a right to sue. The Act has exactly two sections: one enacting § 622-A, and one making appropriations. That absence has been reported as an open question. It is not one.

Maine's general penalty section for this subchapter, 26 M.R.S. § 626-A, applies to "section 600-A, sections 621-A to 623 or section 626, 628, 628-A, 629, 629-B or 639-A." The new section is numbered 622-A, which falls inside the range "621-A to 623." The drafters did not need to amend the penalty section because they chose a section number the penalty section already reached. The exposure is therefore "a fine of not less than $100 nor more than $500 for each violation," live from the first day the section was in force.

Per violation is the phrase that decides the size of the number. A single missing range on a single posting is a $100 to $500 problem. An employer that ran 25 open requisitions through the summer without ranges is looking at $2,500 to $12,500 on the same arithmetic, and the fix for all 25 was one set of bands.

The contrast in the middle rows is the useful part. When Maine wanted to give individuals a claim, as it did for the salary history ban in 2019, it said so in plain words and added compensatory damages. Section 622-A says nothing of the kind. On the face of the statutes, a posting violation is an enforcement matter for the Department rather than a lawsuit waiting for a plaintiff. That is a materially lighter risk profile than Virginia, which pairs an Attorney General action of up to $1,000 and $5,000 with a private one-year claim for actual damages.

Two things should stop you relaxing about it. The first is in LD 54's own second section, which appropriates money for exactly "one Labor and Safety Inspector position": $75,336 in personal services plus $6,065 in other costs, $81,401 from the General Fund for 2026-27. One funded inspector means enforcement will be complaint-driven rather than a sweep of every careers page in the state. It also means a complaint is likely to be answered.

The second is that Maine turned on the posting duty and sharpened the enforcement machinery on the same day. LD 1587 also took effect July 29, 2026, and by the Department's own description it confirms the Bureau of Labor Standards' authority to inspect records, interview witnesses, issue subpoenas and order remedies including civil penalties, and adds collection tools for penalties after final agency action. A modest per-violation fine collected by a newly equipped agency is a different proposition from the same fine on paper.

Maine has banned compensation history inquiries since 2019 under 26 M.R.S. § 628-A. An employer "may not use or inquire about the compensation history of a prospective employee from the prospective employee or a current or former employer of the prospective employee" until "an offer of employment that includes all terms of compensation has been negotiated and made." After that point the employer may inquire or confirm.

Two features make Maine's version stricter than it first looks. The ban covers using the information as well as asking for it, so a figure that arrives unprompted still cannot drive your offer. And it reaches inquiries to a current or former employer, so a reference call or a background check vendor cannot obtain what you may not ask for directly. The only exception is where a federal or state law specifically requires disclosure or verification of compensation history.

Put § 628-A and § 622-A together and the shape of Maine hiring is settled. You publish your number first and you are not allowed to learn theirs until an offer with all terms has been made. There is no version of that sequence where the old habit of anchoring on a candidate's last salary survives, which is why the pay range you post is now doing the work that the salary history question used to do. That is a salary structure problem, not a recruiting one.

If you hire beyond Maine, the thresholds differ but the answer converges on one set of bands. Start with the pay transparency laws by state overview, then the mechanics of writing salary ranges into job postings. For roles open to candidates anywhere, the rules that actually bite are in remote job salary range requirements, and the wage data behind a sourceable range is covered in BLS salary data. The number you put in a Maine posting is worked through step by step in choosing the pay range to post in a Maine job posting.