Pay Transparency Is Coming Whether You're Ready or Not
Three years ago, salary range disclosure laws were mostly a California and Colorado thing. Today, they’ve spread to New York, Washington, Illinois, Massachusetts, and a growing list of others. If your business operates in multiple states or hires remotely, this is no longer someone else’s problem.
Pay transparency laws generally require employers to disclose salary ranges in job postings and some go further, requiring disclosure upon request to current employees. The specifics vary by jurisdiction, but the direction of travel is clear: more transparency, not less.
Here’s what this means in practice for small businesses.
You need to know your ranges before you post. This sounds simple. For businesses without a compensation structure, it’s not. If you don’t know what you pay for a role, you can’t post a range. And a range of “$50,000 to $150,000” is not a range, it’s a placeholder that tells candidates nothing and may actually hurt your ability to attract serious applicants.
Your internal equity needs to be defensible. When employees can see that an open role at their level is posted at a range that doesn’t match what they’re making, you will get questions. If you can’t explain the discrepancy with something more substantive than “it’s a different situation,” you have a problem.
Remote hiring makes this more complicated. If you’re hiring someone remotely and could foreseeably employ them in a pay transparency state, many laws require disclosure regardless of where your business is located. The remote work era has essentially nationalized this issue for any company that hires across state lines.
The compliance piece matters, but the strategic piece matters more. Companies that have embraced pay transparency: Whole Foods, Buffer, and others, report that it builds trust and actually improves recruitment. Candidates self-select more accurately. Negotiation becomes less of a game. The discomfort is real but temporary. The benefits compound.
If you’ve been putting off building a real compensation structure because it feels like a big project, pay transparency requirements are a useful forcing function. You need the structure anyway. Now you need it visibly.
→ If pay transparency requirements are catching you without a structure to back them up, now is the time to build one. We can help you do that in a way that’s both compliant and genuinely fair.