Pay Transparency by State: Who Actually Posts Salaries

Whether a job posting tells you what it pays is one of the clearest signals of how a company treats candidates — and, it turns out, one of the clearest signals of where the company is hiring. We analyzed salary disclosure across 2.4 million active job postings to see who's actually putting a number on the table.

Key findings

• 58% of active postings disclose pay — better than a coin flip, but not by much. Narrow to the US, which is 85.6% of the sample, and it's 64%.
• Disclosure tracks state law. Among the 30 states with the most postings, the nine that require a pay range in the posting show pay in 82–90% of listings. The other 21 run from 72% down to 42%, and most sit in the 40s and 50s.
• Across that same group, the spread between the top (Washington, 90%) and the bottom (Texas, 42%) is 48 percentage points, across samples of tens of thousands of postings each.

Disclosure is a map of the law

Rank the 30 states with the most postings by disclosure rate, and the top nine are, with no exceptions, precisely the nine that have enacted pay-range-in-posting laws: Washington, Colorado, Minnesota, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, California, and Maryland. Then the table falls off a cliff — a ten-point drop from Maryland at 82% to Virginia at 72%, and downhill from there.

That alignment is almost too clean: a posting-disclosure law on the books, and more than eight in ten listings carry a number; no law, and it's closer to five in ten. (Connecticut, at 65%, is a telling in-between — its law requires employers to share a range on request rather than in the posting itself.)

A caveat worth stating plainly, because it's the first thing a careful reader should ask: this is a correlation in a snapshot, not a measured effect. States differ in industry mix as well as in law, and industry moves disclosure a lot on its own — in this same sample it runs from 41% of hospitality postings up to 80% of consulting postings. What we can say is that no other cut we ran sorts the table into a clean block of nine.

Salary disclosure by US state

The 30 US states with the most active postings in the sample — each with more than 20,000 — ranked by disclosure rate:

These 30 states account for 1,748,411 postings and disclose at a weighted 63.3% — above the 58% headline, because the headline covers the whole sample. Everything the table leaves out (smaller states and territories, US postings whose state we couldn't resolve, and the 14.4% of postings outside the US, where disclosure is much rarer) comes in at 42.2% and pulls the overall rate down. US postings on their own land at 63.8%.

If you're job hunting

Two takeaways. First, a missing salary range often says more about the state than about the role, so don't over-read it when you apply somewhere without a disclosure law. Second, you have more standing to ask than you think: across most of the country nobody is required to post pay, which makes a polite early question ("what's the budgeted range for this role?") completely normal. Our guides to evaluating a job offer and negotiating your salary cover how to do it well.

If you're hiring

In the nine ranked states that already mandate a posted range, more than eight in ten listings carry one; across the rest of the country, most still say nothing. If you hire across state lines you are already publishing ranges for part of your pipeline, which makes the real question whether the rest of your postings match. A range up front also lets candidates self-select, which cuts wasted interviews on both sides.