Virginia pay transparency law: the salary range rules for job postings

Virginia enacted this in the 2026 session as chapters 996 and 1063 of the Acts of Assembly, codified at § 40.1-28.7:12, and the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry confirmed it applies beginning July 1, 2026. The striking feature for a small employer is what the section does not contain: any employee-count threshold at all. Most posting laws start at a headcount. Virginia does not, so the question of whether you are big enough to be covered never arises.

The duty also runs wider than external recruiting. The statute reaches "each public and internal posting for each job, promotion, transfer, or other employment opportunity." An internal note announcing an open team lead role is a posting for these purposes. Employers that carefully fix their careers page and leave the intranet alone have solved half the problem.

Thresholds are the trigger for the posting duty and are summarized from each state's own page on this site. A company operating in several of these states inherits the strictest rule it touches, which in practice means the Virginia rule, because there is no size below which it stops applying.

This is the part worth reading in the statute rather than in a summary. Virginia defines a "wage or salary range" as the minimum and maximum for the position, "set in good faith by reference to any applicable pay scale, any previously determined wage or salary range for the position, the actual range of wages or salaries for persons currently holding equivalent positions, or the budgeted amount available for the position, as applicable."

Four permitted anchors, and you pick the one that fits. That matters because a small employer hiring a role it has never filled before often assumes it has nothing to anchor to and posts a guess. It does have something: the budgeted amount available for the position is expressly one of the four. Whichever anchor you use, write down which one it was at the time you posted, because the good faith question is asked afterwards and answered from your records.

The common first reaction to a posting law is to post a range so wide it cannot be wrong. In Virginia that reaction is specifically anticipated. Subdivision B 6 makes it a violation to "fail to set a wage or salary range in good faith," and then adds that "any analysis of whether the wage or salary range has been set in good faith shall consider, among other things, the breadth of such wage or salary range."

Read that as a rule about evidence. Breadth is not merely allowed to be considered, the statute says it shall be. So a $60,000 to $220,000 posting is not a cautious answer to the law, it is a fact a court is directed to weigh against you, and it is the single easiest violation for an outsider to spot from the posting alone without knowing anything about your company. Bad faith here does not require intent to deceive, only a range you cannot explain.

The practical defense is unexciting and effective: a narrow range you can source. If the number came from a documented method applied to market data, the breadth question answers itself. That is the whole argument for building salary bands before a law forces you to, and for deciding how wide a salary range should be on purpose rather than by nerves.

One caution if you hire in more than one state: this good faith and breadth test is Virginia's own, not a national standard. Maine's posting law took effect four weeks later and contains neither phrase, asking instead for the range the employer "anticipates relying on in setting wages." Much of the published coverage treats the two as one rule because they arrived together, so if you are working from a combined summary, check it against the Maine pay transparency law before you apply Virginia's width analysis to a Portland posting. Delaware is the one state that copies this drafting: 19 Del. C. § 709C(c)(1)a makes the breadth of the range a factor in the good faith analysis in almost the same words, effective September 26, 2027, so a template built for Virginia will transfer to a Delaware job posting on that point and not to a Maine one.

Virginia gives employers a chance to fix a posting before anyone can sue over it, and the details are more employer-friendly in one respect and less in another than the usual one-line summary suggests.

Subsection F says an employer "shall be afforded an opportunity to correct a violation of subdivision B 5 or 6 before a prospective employee may bring an action," that "any person may provide written notice to the employer alleging that the employer's posting does not comply," and that if the employer "corrects the posting on the original posting locations within 15 business days of receiving such notice, no action for a violation of subdivision B 5 or 6 shall be brought."

Three things follow that are easy to miss. First, the notice can come from any person, not only an applicant, so a competitor, a job board, or someone who simply reads postings can start your clock. Second, the statute says a notice about a particular posting "shall constitute adequate notice for the duration of such posting for any prospective employee seeking remedies under this section." One notice attaches to the posting, not to the person who sent it, so you do not get a fresh 15 days for each new complainant about the same advertisement. Third, the cure covers subdivisions B 5 and B 6 only, which are the posting and good faith duties. Nothing in the cure provision protects a salary history violation under B 1 through B 4.

The same section bans salary history. An employer may not seek an applicant's wage or salary history, may not rely on it in considering the applicant, and may not rely on it in setting pay at hire. It may not refuse to interview, hire, employ or promote, or otherwise retaliate against someone for declining to hand it over or for asking what the range is. The definition covers pay from a current or previous employer, and the prohibition on seeking it is not limited to asking the candidate, so routing the question through a former employer or a third-party service does not help.

There is one carve-out and it runs in a single direction. If an applicant volunteers their history without prompting, subsection D lets the employer rely on it "to support a wage or salary higher than the employer's initial offer of compensation," and lets the employer seek to confirm it for that same purpose, in both cases only so far as the higher figure does not violate Virginia Code § 40.1-28.6 or federal law. It is a ratchet that only turns up. Volunteered history can justify paying someone more than you first offered. It can never justify paying less, and it cannot be used to walk an offer down.

Every figure above is from the text of Va. Code § 40.1-28.7:12 as enacted by 2026 Acts of Assembly chapters 996 and 1063. The court "may award any other legal and equitable relief it deems appropriate" in the Attorney General's action as well, so the stated penalty caps are not the ceiling on the total cost of getting this wrong.

If you hire across state lines, the thresholds differ but the practical 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 remote roles open to candidates anywhere, the rules that bite are covered in remote job salary range requirements, and the method behind the numbers is in BLS salary data. The good faith range itself is walked through step by step in setting a good faith salary range for Virginia job postings.