Pay Transparency Laws by State 2026: Salary Range Requirements for Remote Job Postings

This is the single most misread part of these laws, and it is the reason a company with no employees in New York can still owe a New York disclosure.

New York Labor Law 194-b covers any job advertised that "will physically be performed, at least in part, in the state of New York, including a job, promotion, or transfer opportunity that will physically be performed outside of New York but reports to a supervisor, office, or other work site in New York." Illinois uses almost identical wording: 820 ILCS 112/10 applies to positions that "(i) will be physically performed, at least in part, in Illinois or (ii) will be physically performed outside of Illinois, but the employee reports to a supervisor, office, or other work site in Illinois."

Read that twice if you run a distributed team. A startup with a Chicago head of engineering hiring a fully remote developer who lives in Arizona and never sets foot in Illinois is covered by the Illinois rule, because the reporting line lands in Illinois. The hire's location is irrelevant to the test. So is the company's state of incorporation.

Colorado approaches it from the other direction and ends up even broader. Coverage turns on whether the work could be performed in Colorado, so a posting that says "remote, US" has effectively invited Colorado in. Colorado was first to this in 2021 and a fair number of employers responded by writing "not available to applicants in Colorado" into their listings, which is legal but reads badly and shrinks the pool for no real gain now that eleven other jurisdictions have followed.

The practical upshot: if you advertise a role as remote anywhere in the US, assume at least one posting-disclosure law reaches it. Working out which one, state by state, is slower than simply publishing the range. That is the calculation most multi-state employers have already made, and it is why the share of US postings carrying a range keeps climbing faster than the number of states requiring one. If you are also working out which state's wage and hour rules follow the hire, that is a separate and equally unintuitive question, covered on which state laws apply to remote employees.

Penalties are assessed per violation, and in most of these states a violation means a posting rather than a hiring round. Run twelve open roles on a non-compliant template and the exposure multiplies by twelve.

Washington is the most precisely drafted and, once you read it, the most forgiving. RCW 49.58.110 sets statutory damages of "no less than $100 and no more than $5,000 per violation" plus reasonable attorneys' fees and costs. But the same section gives you a cure window: if the employer corrects the posting within five business days of receiving written notice, and where applicable contacts any third-party posting entity with a demand to correct it, then "neither the department nor the court may assess or award penalties, damages, or other relief under this section for the violation." Five business days, and the exposure goes to zero. Very few employers appear to know this.

California has a narrower but similar out. Labor Code 432.3(d)(4) sets a civil penalty of $100 to $10,000 per violation, and then adds that "for a first violation of subdivision (c), no penalty shall be assessed upon demonstration by the employer that all job postings for open positions have been updated to include the pay scale." Note the word all. Fixing the one posting somebody complained about does not qualify. You have to clean the whole board.

New York is quieter about the number than most summaries suggest. Section 194-b(5)(b) says a non-compliant employer "shall be subject to a civil penalty in accordance with section two hundred eighteen of this chapter," which is the general Labor Law penalty section rather than a bespoke schedule. The widely quoted $1,000, then $2,000, then $3,000 figures come from that general section, not from 194-b itself, which is a distinction worth keeping straight if anyone is quoting the statute at you.

One more that catches job boards and the employers who use them. Both California and Illinois put obligations on the third party publishing the ad. California requires the employer to hand the pay scale to any third party it engages, and requires the third party to include it. Illinois goes further and makes the third party directly liable for omitting the pay scale and benefits, unless it can show the employer never supplied them. If you post through an ATS feed or an aggregator, the range has to survive the handoff.

Most coverage of these laws stops at the salary number. Several of the statutes ask for more than that, and the extras are where otherwise careful postings fail.

• Benefits. Washington wants "a general description of all of the benefits and other compensation to be offered to the hired applicant." Minnesota uses the same construction. Illinois requires the pay scale and benefits. Colorado, Maryland and New Jersey all ask for a general benefits description too. A range with no benefits line is a non-compliant posting in six jurisdictions even though the number is right there.
• An application deadline. Colorado is alone in requiring the date the application window closes, which quietly rules out the evergreen always-open posting that a lot of employers run by default.
• The job description. New York requires the job description alongside the compensation, if one exists.
• A fixed amount instead of a range. Washington says that where the employer is offering only a fixed wage, it must disclose the fixed amount rather than inventing a scale around it.
• Healthcare specifically. The District of Columbia is reported to require disclosure of healthcare benefits before the first interview, which is a step earlier than everyone else.

Illinois offers the one genuine shortcut in the whole set: the statute says that including "a hyperlink to a publicly viewable webpage that includes the pay scale and benefits satisfies the requirements for inclusion." No other state grants that outright. If you maintain a compensation page, an Illinois posting can point at it instead of restating everything inline.

Auditing fifteen jurisdictions per requisition is not a real workflow. Almost every multi-state employer converges on the same answer, which is to write to the strictest common denominator once and stop thinking about it.

That template is short. Publish a genuine minimum and maximum, not an open-ended figure and not a range so wide it communicates nothing. California 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," and every other state uses some version of good faith, which is the standard a regulator will read your range against. Add a general description of benefits and other compensation, including bonus and commission structure. Add the application close date. Add the job description. Name the states you will not hire in, if any, so the geographic scope is on the record.

Then hold the range honestly. The failure mode that generates complaints is not a missing number, it is a published band of $60,000 to $220,000 for one job, which regulators in several states have signalled they will treat as no disclosure at all.

There is a commercial argument for all of this that has nothing to do with compliance. Postings with a visible range draw more applications from people who are actually in band, which lowers screening volume and shortens time to fill. It shows up directly in the arithmetic on our cost per hire calculator, because interviewer time is usually the largest line in the total, and it shows up again in cost per applicant, where a posting that lets candidates self-select converts the traffic you already paid for. Every listing on this board carries the range for exactly that reason. If you are still deciding where to advertise, the remote job posting pricing page has the flat-fee comparison, and how to write a remote job description covers the rest of the post.

Finally, a compliance obligation that follows the same logic and is easy to miss when you hire across state lines: the income tax withholding question. It is decided by a completely different test, and it is worked through on state tax withholding for remote employees.

One staffing consequence of all this is now visible in the federal projections, and it is worth a line for anyone deciding whether to build this capability in house. Compliant pay ranges have to be built by somebody, and the occupation that builds them, compensation, benefits and job analysis specialists, is projected by BLS to grow 6 percent from 2025 to 2035 against a 3.5 percent all-occupation average, with about 9,000 openings a year and a $78,210 median annual wage for May 2025. The work is also almost entirely remote-capable, since it is survey and spreadsheet work: the occupational group it belongs to was 27.9 percent fully remote in 2025. If you would rather hire the skill than buy it, remote HR jobs covers what that market pays.