New York City employers must include salary ranges for any advertised job, promotion or transfer opportunity, effective May 15. It behooves employers nationwide to take note.
Under the regulation, adopted Jan. 15, employers are required to disclose a salary range "from the lowest to the highest salary the employer in good faith believes at the time of the posting it would pay for the advertised job, promotion or transfer opportunity" on all job advertisements for positions in New York City. It applies to employers with more than four employees but excludes temporary hiring firms.
Job postings without minimum and maximum salaries will be considered an "unlawful discriminatory practice" under the city's human rights law and may result in a fine of up to $125,000.
Salary ranges in job ads will show what workers in one of the nation's most expensive talent markets stand to earn. It also makes it easier for job seekers to know where to start negotiating, Forbes notes.
The New York City law stands to have spillover effects.
"Given it's New York City, how large a labor market it is and the organizations that are headquartered there, it's very much a game changer," Tauseef Rahman, partner at human resources consulting firm Mercer, told Forbes. "What we're seeing is some organizations start to realize that taking a state-by-state approach isn't really a scalable solution."
The current city-by-city or state-by-state approach to pay transparency makes for employer headaches.
Colorado's Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, which took effect Jan. 1, requires employers based anywhere in the U.S. with at least one employee in Colorado to disclose salary compensation and employee benefits in job postings for positions that are expected to be, or can be, performed in the state, including remotely.
Bills mandating the public posting of jobs' pay ranges are progressing through the legislature in New York state and await the governor's signature in Washington, while a bill to amend a current law in California would require employers to include pay scales in job postings. Connecticut, Rhode Island and Nevada require employers to share pay ranges in the application process.
"It's an administrative nightmare," Cheryl Pinarchick, co-chair of the pay equity practice group at law firm Fisher Phillips, told Forbes. "If you don't have one consistent unified approach, it is really challenging and it takes a ton of resources."