Good Faith Salary Range: How to Set the Pay Range for a Remote Job Posting

Short answer: a good faith salary range is the band you genuinely expect to pay for this specific opening, and it is the legal standard in every state that requires a range in the job posting. California writes it into the statute as "a good faith estimate of the salary or hourly wage range that the employer reasonably expects to pay for the position upon hire." Build it from market percentile data for the occupation, keep the spread inside roughly 20 to 40 percent for a single level, and make sure your actual offers land inside it.

Twelve US jurisdictions now require a pay range in the advertisement itself. If you want to know which ones reach your posting, and at what employee count, our pay transparency laws by state page has a state checker and the penalty attached to each. This article is about the harder half of the problem, which is deciding what number to put in the box once you know you have to put one there.

What "good faith" actually means in these statutes

The phrase is doing real work, and it is worth reading carefully rather than assuming it is boilerplate. California Labor Code 432.3(m)(1) defines pay scale as "a good faith estimate of the salary or hourly wage range that the employer reasonably expects to pay for the position upon hire." Three things follow from that wording.

It is forward looking. The question is what you expect to pay for this hire, not what the last person in the seat earned or what the band was set at three years ago. A range copied from an old requisition is not an estimate of anything.

It is about this position. Not the job family, not the level, this opening. A range built to cover a whole career ladder fails the test even if every number in it is one somebody at the company genuinely earns.

It is an expectation, not a promise. Good faith does not lock you in. If a candidate turns out to be materially stronger than the role you scoped, paying above the top of the band is normal and is not a violation. The exposure runs the other way, which we come back to below.

No state has published a numeric width limit. What several have signalled, and what the standard implies, is that a range wide enough to be true of any outcome communicates nothing and will not be treated as disclosure. The band of $60,000 to $220,000 for a single engineering role is the example that gets cited, and it is the shape that draws complaints.

Start from market percentile data, not from your budget

Most bad ranges come from the same place: someone starts with what the team can afford, calls it the top of the range, and works down. That produces a band that is defensible internally and invisible externally, because it sits under the market and every qualified applicant screens it out in four seconds.

The free, national, non-self-reported starting point is the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program, which publishes percentile wages for around 800 occupations. Here are the May 2024 national figures for occupations that show up constantly in remote hiring, read at bls.gov:

Two caveats that matter more than the numbers. BLS data lags by roughly a year, so for 2026 postings you are reading 2024 wages and should expect the real market to sit above them. And BLS does not separate remote from on-site, so for roles where remote work carries a premium or a discount the percentile is a floor to reason from rather than an answer.

Use the percentiles as brackets. A mid-level role usually sits between the 25th and 75th; a senior specialist between the 75th and 90th. Then sanity-check the bracket against what you already pay. If you want to interrogate your own payroll history rather than eyeball it, you can now ask your own data questions in plain English instead of waiting on a report from finance, which makes internal benchmarking a ten minute job rather than a quarterly one.

How wide should the band be

A workable rule for a single level is a spread of about 20 to 40 percent from floor to ceiling. On a role with a $100,000 midpoint that is roughly $85,000 to $115,000, which is wide enough to price experience differences and narrow enough to describe one job.

The width should track how much genuine variance the role carries. A junior support role with a defined scope earns a tight band. A staff engineering role where the difference between two hires is worth six figures of output earns a wider one. What the width should never track is your negotiating position. A band stretched at the bottom so you have room to lowball is precisely what the good faith standard is written against, and it is also self-defeating: candidates read the floor as the offer.

Build the band from the bottom rather than the middle. Ask what you would actually pay someone who meets the minimum requirements as written in the posting. That number is your floor. If it feels too low to publish, the requirements are probably overwritten, which is worth fixing anyway. Then set the ceiling at what you would pay the strongest realistic candidate, and if the two are more than about 40 percent apart, you are advertising two jobs and should split the posting.

What to publish next to the number

The range on its own is not compliant in six of the twelve posting states. Washington and Minnesota both want a general description of all benefits and other compensation. Illinois requires pay scale and benefits, and uniquely lets you satisfy it with a hyperlink to a public compensation page. Colorado additionally wants the date the application window closes, which rules out the evergreen always-open listing. New York wants the job description alongside the compensation.

For variable pay, say how it works rather than folding it into the range. If a sales role is $70,000 base with $70,000 variable, publishing "$70,000 to $140,000" is technically a range and practically a misrepresentation. Publish the base band, then the on-target earnings, then the quota. Sales candidates do that arithmetic anyway and the ones who do it and stay are the ones you want.

The structural detail most employers miss: in California and Illinois the obligation follows the posting onto third-party boards. California requires the employer to give the pay scale to any third party it engages and requires that third party to include it. Illinois makes the third party directly liable unless it can show the employer never supplied the information. If you syndicate through an ATS feed, confirm the range survives the handoff, because a compliant posting on your careers page and a stripped version on an aggregator is still a stripped version.

When the range you can afford is below market

This is the situation nobody writes about, and it is common. Publishing a below-market band feels like advertising a weakness. Hiding it costs more.

A below-market range that is published honestly filters out the candidates who were never going to accept, which is most of the cost of a hiring round. Interviewer time is normally the largest line in cost per hire, and you can see how quickly it dominates on our cost per hire calculator. Every candidate who reaches a final round and then declines on compensation has consumed several hours of it. The same effect shows up on the advertising side in cost per applicant, where a posting that lets people self-select converts the traffic you already paid for instead of buying applications you will reject.

If the band really is under market, put the compensating factors in the posting next to it rather than in the recruiter screen. Fully remote with no location adjustment, four day weeks, unusual equity, a real training budget, genuine seniority earlier than a larger company would offer. Those are worth money to a specific kind of candidate and they only work if the candidate sees them before deciding whether to apply. How to write a remote job description covers where each of those goes.

And if you are hiring across state lines, the pay range is only the first of the multi-state obligations that attach to the hire. Withholding is decided by an unrelated test and lands in surprising places, which is worked through on state tax withholding for remote employees. When you are ready to advertise, every listing on this board shows the range by default, and the remote job posting pricing page has the flat-fee terms.