The salary range at the bottom of a job ad is not a courtesy. In Colorado it is a legal requirement, and since January 1, 2024 employers there have had to publish the pay or the pay range, a general description of the benefits, and the date the application window is expected to close. What that number does for the person reading it is a narrower question than it sounds, and the evidence splits in two directions at once.
What does a pay transparency law actually require?
Mostly three things: a number in the posting, an answer when a worker asks, and a paper trail. California's rule applies to employers with 15 or more employees and has been in force since January 1, 2023. It defines a pay scale as "the salary or hourly wage range the employer reasonably expects to pay for a position," and it gives applicants and current employees the right to request that scale, per the California Labor Commissioner's Office. A set rate is acceptable where a range does not apply; bonuses, tips and benefits may be added but are not compelled.
Colorado's Equal Pay for Equal Work Act walks further into the building. Beyond the rate or range and the benefits description, the statute requires employers to make reasonable efforts to announce each job opportunity to all employees on the same calendar day and before a selection decision is made. Within 30 days of a hire, coworkers must be told the selected candidate's name, the former and new job titles, and how to signal interest in similar openings later. Where a role sits on a defined ladder, the employer must disclose the requirements for career progression alongside compensation, benefits, duties and status.
That second half is the part that rarely makes the headlines. A posted range tells an outsider what a job is worth. The internal notice tells the person already on the payroll that the job existed at all.
Who is the gap biggest for?
Women working full time had median usual weekly earnings of $1,131 in the second quarter of 2026, against $1,380 for men — 82.0 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics release published on July 21, 2026. The single ratio hides the spread underneath it. Black women's median was $991 a week. Hispanic or Latina women's was $902. White women's was $1,142, and Asian women's was $1,489.
Measured against white men rather than against men in the same group, the distances get longer. In its December 2022 report on women in the workforce, the Government Accountability Office found that across 2018, 2019 and 2021, Hispanic or Latina women earned an estimated 58 cents and Black women 63 cents for every dollar earned by white men, while white women earned 79 cents. Education did not close it: women with a bachelor's degree earned an estimated 70 cents on the dollar. GAO also found women made up an estimated 44 percent of the workforce and an estimated 41 percent of managers, and was explicit that its analysis is descriptive and does not confirm or refute discriminatory practices.
Does posting the range raise pay, or lower it?
It depends on who is allowed to see what. In "Is Pay Transparency Good?", the Harvard Business School economist Zoe Cullen sorts the policies into three kinds and finds they pull in different directions. The paper circulated as HBS working paper 23-039 in March 2023 and was published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2024.
Laws like Colorado's and California's are the cross-firm kind: they tell job seekers what other employers are paying, which makes searching cheaper and forces companies to compete in public. Cullen's review reports that in Slovakia, after mandatory salary posting, "the earnings of those hired after the reform were, on average, 3% higher than the wages of those hired before," and cites a comparable rise of roughly 3 percent in posted salaries in Colorado.
The other kind is horizontal — coworkers seeing each other's pay. Those rules do compress the gap, and they carry a cost. "Employers have responded to pay transparency between co-workers by setting more equal pay, but they have also responded by lowering average wages," Cullen writes. Once a raise for one worker triggers renegotiation across the floor, the employer's incentive is to hold the line, and the paper describes the endpoint as a posted price — an employer take-it-or-leave-it offer. After Denmark's transparency mandate, the paper reports, one study found average wages per employee at affected firms fell by 2.8 percent.
Why does the kind of transparency matter so much?
Because each kind hands information to a different party. Cross-firm disclosure arms the applicant against the market. Horizontal disclosure arms the applicant against her own employer, which is exactly why the employer's counter-move lands on everyone's wages at once. The third kind, vertical transparency, is the one Cullen's review treats most warmly: showing workers what the levels above them pay.
In work with Ricardo Perez-Truglia, Cullen found that "with every 10% boost in perceived managers' salary, subjects projected that their own earnings would be 1.7% higher," and that employees who learned their supervisors earned more than expected put in more effort where advancement looked meritocratic. For a worker weighing whether a ladder is real, the number on the rung above is the useful one — and it is close to what Colorado's career-progression clause requires an employer to write down.
What happens if an employer ignores the rule?
The enforcement is administrative and modest, and it runs on a clock. Colorado's statute sets fines of $500 to $10,000 per violation, determined by the division director, with a complaint period of one year from discovery of the violation, per the text of the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act. California sets civil penalties between $100 and $10,000 per violation, enforceable through a complaint to the Labor Commissioner's Office filed within a year, or a civil action for injunctive relief.
A missed posting, in other words, is a fine — not a wage. Neither statute sets what the job pays. They set what has to be written down before anyone walks into the room.
So what does the range actually change?
It changes the starting position, and only that. The gap the BLS measures every quarter is built out of occupation, hours, promotion and negotiation, and no posting requirement touches most of that machinery. What a range does is remove one specific asymmetry: the applicant who did not know what to ask for, and the employee down the hall who did not know the job had opened.
The number in the ad took years of legislating. Reading it takes four seconds. That is the trade the laws are making — a small, checkable disclosure at the exact moment when a worker has the least information and the least leverage — and the research says its effects depend almost entirely on who else gets to see it.
For a related stories perspective, read How Reasonable Accommodation Actually Works at Work.