Pay Transparency by State: Who's Actually Posting Salaries

Whether a job posting tells you what it pays has become one of the clearest signals of how a company treats candidates — and, increasingly, of where the company is hiring. We analyzed salary disclosure across 1.8 million active job postings to see who's actually putting a number on the table.

Key findings

• 55% of active job postings disclose pay — barely better than a coin flip.
• Disclosure tracks the law, not the job. In states that require pay ranges in postings, 78–90% of listings show pay. In states without that requirement, the rate falls to the mid-40s% — and as low as 41%.
• The spread between the top state (Colorado, 90%) and the bottom (Texas, 41%) is 49 percentage points, across samples of tens of thousands of postings each.

Disclosure is a map of the law

The strongest predictor of whether a posting lists pay isn't the industry, the seniority, or the company's size. It's whether the employer is filling a role in a state that requires it. The states at the top of the table — Colorado, Washington, New York, Illinois, Minnesota, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, California — are precisely the jurisdictions that have enacted pay-range-in-posting laws. The states at the bottom haven't.

That alignment is almost too clean: a posting-disclosure law on the books, and roughly eight or nine in ten listings comply; no law, and it's closer to four in ten. (Connecticut, at 59%, is a telling in-between — its law requires employers to share a range on request rather than in the posting itself.)

Salary disclosure by US state

US states with at least 3,000 active postings in the sample, ranked by disclosure rate:

If you're job hunting

Two takeaways. First, a missing salary range usually isn't a red flag about the role — it's about the state, 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

Disclosure is becoming the default whether or not your state mandates it. Candidates increasingly filter out no-pay postings, and a range up front cuts wasted interviews on both sides. The 55% baseline today is heading up — the only question is whether you lead or get dragged.