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 1.6 million active job postings to see who's actually putting a number on the table.

Key findings

• 62% of active postings disclose pay. The sample is 98.1% US, so narrowing to US postings barely moves it: 63%.
• Disclosure tracks state law. Among the 30 states with the most postings, the ten with a pay-range-in-posting law in effect show pay in 74–91% of listings, 82% between them. The other 20 run from 73% down to 41% and come to 47% between them.
• Across that same group, the spread between the top (Washington, 91%) and the bottom (Texas, 41%) is 50 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 ten are, with no exceptions, the ten with a pay-range-in-posting law in effect: Washington, Minnesota, Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, California, New York, Maryland, and Virginia. The newest of them is the most telling. Virginia's law took effect on July 1, 2026, and four months later it sits at the bottom of that group, at 74%.

Then the table falls off a cliff. Connecticut, at 73%, is a telling in-between: its law requires employers to share a range on request rather than in the posting itself. Kentucky follows at 63%, and every other state in the table is at 52% or below.

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 40% of food-service postings up to 93% of consulting postings. What we can say is that no other cut we ran sorts the table into a clean block of ten.

Salary disclosure by US state

The 30 US states with the most active postings in the sample — each with more than 15,000 — ranked by disclosure rate:

These 30 states account for 1,325,316 postings and disclose at a weighted 62.3%, the same as the 62.3% headline. Everything the table leaves out (smaller states and territories, US postings whose state we couldn't resolve, and the 1.9% of postings outside the US) comes in at 62.4%. US postings on their own land at 62.6%.

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 much 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 ten ranked states with a posted-range law in effect, about four in five listings carry a range; across the other 20, fewer than half do. 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.