The Range on the Posting Isn't a Promise
A job listing goes up with a salary range of $68,000 to $94,000. Somewhere in a private Slack channel, a recruiter and a hiring manager are having the conversation that actually determines pay — and it doesn't touch either end of that spread. It centers on a number closer to $74,000, bounded on one side by what the last two people in the role were paid and on the other by how much room the budget has before finance starts asking questions. The range on the posting exists because a state law requires it. The number in the private channel exists because that's what the company was always going to offer, transparency law or not.
That gap is the whole story of pay transparency legislation so far. Colorado's Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, the first law of its kind, took effect in January 2021 and forced employers to list a good-faith salary range on every posted job. California followed with SB 1162, effective January 2023, applying the same requirement to any employer with fifteen or more employees. Washington amended its Equal Pay and Opportunities Act that same year to add wage ranges and benefits summaries. New York City's version had already been in force since November 2022, and New York State extended a similar rule statewide in September 2023. Illinois joined the list starting January 2025. Each of these laws did the one thing they were built to do: they made the number visible before a candidate wasted three interview rounds finding out the job paid less than their rent.
Why the Law Only Covers Half the Conversation
None of these statutes say anything about where inside the range an actual offer has to land. A company can post $68,000 to $94,000 and offer every single hire $70,000, and as long as the number technically falls inside the disclosed band, the posting satisfies the law. Legal compliance and a fair offer are two different things being measured by two different people — a lawyer checking a box and a candidate reading a hopeful number — and nothing in the statute requires those two people to agree.
The workaround nobody talks about
This mechanic doesn't apply everywhere, and it's worth being honest about the gap. Most states still have no transparency requirement at all, so a company operating there can post "competitive salary" and negotiate the old way, one candidate at a time, with none of the disclosure. And even inside states that do require it, some remote postings route around the rule by listing the salary range tied to the company's headquarters rather than the range for wherever the applicant actually lives — a workaround that moves faster than any legislature can amend the statute to close it. Don't assume a posted range means the law is doing its full job just because a number appears on the page.
The Anchor Trick: Reading a Range Like a Negotiator
Most candidates read a posted range and mentally anchor to the midpoint, then ask for something close to it during negotiation — which is exactly the outcome employers are counting on, because it means the top third of the band almost never gets discussed at all. Anchor your counter to the top of the range instead, and be specific about why: years of directly relevant experience, a certification the job description asked for, a track record the interviewers already confirmed they liked. Vague requests for "more" get vague pushback. A number tied to something concrete gets a real answer.
Here's what to actually do with a posted range before the first phone screen:
- Treat the bottom third of the range as the offer for someone with the minimum qualifications listed in the posting — if you exceed those qualifications, say so explicitly when you counter.
- Ask the recruiter directly, on the first call, where most recent hires for this role landed inside the range. Some will answer. The ones who dodge the question just told you something too.
- Don't take a verbal "that's around where we were thinking" as a commitment. Get the actual figure in writing before you resign from your current job or turn down a competing offer.
- And if the posting lists a spread wider than about 20% of the low end — say, $68,000 to $94,000 — read that as a signal the company hasn't decided what the role is worth yet, not as room to negotiate freely.
Internal Compression Is the Quiet Cousin of the Lowball
Nobody calls it a lowball when it happens to someone who already has the job.
There's a second problem transparency laws don't touch at all, and it shows up after someone's already been hired, not during the offer stage. A company raises its posted range to stay competitive with the market, brings in new hires at the higher end of that new band, and leaves existing employees on salaries set under the old range — sometimes years earlier. The new person doing the same job with less experience ends up earning close to, or more than, the person who trained them. Compensation teams call this compression, and it's become common enough at companies with public salary bands that some employees now find out about it by comparing notes with a new hire during onboarding, not through any process HR initiated.
The honest fix is a market adjustment cycle that runs separately from the annual performance-review raise, and most companies that take pay equity seriously do run one. The dishonest version is a manager telling a compressed employee that a raise "isn't in the budget this cycle" while the same company is actively posting new roles at a higher band than that employee's current salary — a contradiction anyone can check by simply searching the company's own careers page. If you suspect you're compressed, that search is the first thing to do, not the last.
Who the Law Doesn't Cover at All
Pay transparency statutes are also narrower than most people assume, and the gaps matter more than the headline coverage. Internal promotions and transfers usually fall outside the disclosure requirement entirely, since most laws are written around external job postings, not the offer an employer makes to someone already on staff. Independent contractor and 1099 roles are frequently exempt too — a distinction that matters more every year as companies lean on contract-to-hire arrangements specifically because the earlier stage of that relationship sits outside the same rules. Executive search is its own separate world, largely negotiated through recruiters and never posted publicly in the first place, range or no range.
Company size thresholds create another blind spot. California's law only applies to employers with fifteen or more employees; Colorado's applies more broadly but still carves out remote roles with no Colorado-based employees at all. A twelve-person startup in Denver can legally post "salary commensurate with experience" and negotiate with zero disclosure, while the four-hundred-person company two blocks away has to publish a real number. None of that is a loophole in the sense of being an abuse of the law — it's the law working exactly as its drafters wrote it, with size and jurisdiction lines that were negotiated compromises, not oversights. Knowing where those lines fall tells you when a posted range is meaningful and when the absence of one isn't actually breaking any rule.
What Actually Changes When You Ask for the Top of the Band
The honest version of this whole mechanic is uncomfortable: a posted salary range is a legal disclosure, not a negotiating gift, and it was never designed to hand candidates leverage — it was designed to stop them from applying to jobs that could never have paid what they needed in the first place. That's a real and useful function. It is not the same thing as a guarantee that the number you deserve is the number you'll be offered.
Ask for specifics anyway. Ask where the last hire landed, ask what qualifications separate the bottom of the range from the top, and ask in writing once a verbal number gets mentioned. None of that requires the law to do more than it already does — it just requires treating the range printed on the posting as the opening line of the negotiation, not the answer to it.