The Range Was Right There in the Posting
The listing said $92,000–$128,000. It had said so for six weeks, because the company operates in Colorado and the law requires a real range, not a decorative one. On the phone screen, the recruiter opened with $94,000 "to start," framed as generous, framed as a place to build from. The candidate said that sounded fair. Nobody mentioned the other $34,000 sitting in plain sight at the top of the same page she'd bookmarked three weeks earlier.
That gap between what a law forces a company to disclose and what a candidate actually does with the number is where most of the value of pay transparency legislation is quietly leaking out. States passed these laws to shrink pay gaps at scale, not to hand any single person a script. Reading the range and using the range turn out to be two entirely different skills, and only one of them shows up automatically when a job posting loads.
How the Range Got There in the First Place
Colorado went first, in 2021, requiring employers to post a good-faith salary range on every job opening. California and Washington followed with their own versions effective January 2023, both applying the rule even to remote roles a Californian or Washingtonian could fill from home — which is why national job boards started showing ranges on postings that had nothing to do with those two states. New York City had already required it under Local Law 32 in late 2022; New York State extended a similar rule statewide the following September. Then came a second wave that a lot of job seekers still haven't clocked: Illinois and Minnesota both switched their disclosure rules on January 1, 2025, New Jersey followed that June, Vermont in July, and Massachusetts brought its own law into force at the end of October. In under five years, the map went from a single state to more than fifteen, and the trend line points one direction. More bills covering the same ground were introduced in state legislatures in 2026 alone, which means a posting with no range today may carry one within the year regardless of what the company would otherwise choose to disclose on its own.
Britain never adopted the American model of a range on every posting. Instead, companies with 250 or more employees publish an annual gender pay gap report every April, comparing median and mean pay across the whole organization rather than per role. It's a blunter, slower instrument — you can't hold up a single job listing and say "that number, please" — but the reports are public, searchable, and worth pulling before a UK salary conversation for the same reason a posted U.S. range is worth pulling before an American one: it tells you what the employer is actually paying people who already work there, not what a recruiter feels like offering you today.
A Wide Range Is Not an Invitation to Negotiate Low
Here's the part almost nobody does on purpose. A posted range of $85,000 to $120,000 isn't a suggestion that $85,000 is the safe, modest choice for someone who doesn't want to seem greedy. It's the company's own written admission, filed to satisfy a state law, that $120,000 is a number they already planned to pay somebody for this exact job. Anchor your ask in the top third of the posted range, not the middle, and make the recruiter argue you down from there instead of negotiating up from a number you picked out of politeness. Most candidates do the opposite instinctively — they treat the bottom of the range as the real offer and the top as a fantasy nobody actually gets, which is precisely the read that keeps average pay clustered near the floor a law was written to raise. Pull up the last three postings you saw for your own title and check the pattern for yourself; more often than not, the bottom number gets treated as gospel and the top number gets treated as marketing.
The Range on the Posting Isn't Always the Range for You
Ranges lie by omission more than by commission.
A single posting sometimes covers three internal levels at once — associate, mid, and senior — folded into one wide band because the hiring manager wasn't sure yet which level the role would land at, or because HR wanted flexibility to bring in a range of candidates without running three separate job codes. When that's the case, a $70,000 spread doesn't mean the company is being cagey; it means the number that matters to you is a narrower slice inside it, and figuring out which slice requires a direct question, not a guess. Some employers also cap external-hire offers below what current employees earn in the same band, citing internal equity — a real constraint, not always a stalling tactic, and from outside the building the two look identical either way.
What to Actually Say on the Call
Two questions do more work than any amount of research on your own. Ask directly what determines where within the posted range a candidate lands — years of experience, a specific certification, a portfolio of past results — and ask, separately, where current people in this exact role currently fall within that same band. The second question is the one recruiters answer least comfortably, and the one that tells you the most. A recruiter who can name a number without flinching usually works somewhere the range reflects reality. Pivoting instead to "that's more of an internal guideline" tells you something too.
Don't accept a verbal offer below the range's midpoint without asking, on the record, why this particular number sits below what the company told the state it planned to pay for the role. You don't need to accuse anyone of anything. You need one sentence: "I noticed the posting listed a range up to $128,000 — can you walk me through where $94,000 falls within that and what would move it up?" That sentence does not require confidence you don't feel. It requires only that you read the number out loud back to the person who wrote it.
When There's No Range at All
Internal promotions and raises don't come with a posted range, and neither does a job at a small employer sitting just under whatever headcount threshold triggers disclosure in your state — Colorado has none, but New York City's rule kicks in at four employees and Washington's at fifteen, so plenty of small shops sit outside the net entirely. The workaround is borrowing someone else's disclosure. Search the same job title at three or four larger, publicly listed competitors headquartered in a state that requires posting — Glassdoor, LinkedIn Salary, and levels.fyi all index these ranges directly from the postings, no guessing involved — and bring that range into the room as your reference point instead of a vague sense that you're "probably underpaid." A range from a competitor down the street carries more weight in a raise conversation than any amount of "market research shows." Worth checking too: several job boards now display an algorithmic salary estimate next to postings even in states with no disclosure requirement at all, built from aggregated ranges the platform already collects elsewhere — it's not a legal disclosure and it can run wide, but it's still a number pulled from real postings rather than a guess pulled from nowhere.
Six Months Later, the Number Hadn't Moved
The $92,000–$128,000 posting from the opening is still online. It's been filled for months, by someone who accepted $97,000 — three thousand dollars above the recruiter's opening figure, and thirty-one thousand below the number the company had already put in writing. The posting didn't lie. It just assumed nobody would read it as an offer instead of decoration.