Massachusetts employers are now required to share salary ranges

Massachusetts employers are required to post pay ranges for open roles starting Oct. 29.

The requirement stems from a bill that was first passed by the Massachusetts legislature and signed into law by Gov. Maura Healey in July 2024. The legislation builds on the state’s Equal Pay Act, and seeks to help close gender and racial wage gaps in the state.

How Massachusetts employers are affected by this law. The pay transparency provision of the Massachusetts law applies to employers with 25 or more employees who primarily work in the state, including those who are remote.

These businesses must now include a “good faith” annual salary or hourly wage range that they expect to pay for the positions they advertise. From Oct. 29 onward, employees may also request the pay range for the position they currently hold; the law bars employers from retaliating against workers for doing so. They’re also entitled to know the estimated pay range if they’re applying for a promotion or transfer.

Employers with 100 or more employees who submit EEO demographic data reports to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission must now share these with Massachusetts’s Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development, as well. This provision took effect in February.

Where the state stands on pay transparency. More than a dozen states now mandate that employers include salary ranges in job postings, which has spurred most businesses to adopt this practice, even if they’re not in a jurisdiction that requires it.

Indeed data indicates many Massachusetts employers are well on their way to complying with the state’s law—more than one-half (53%) of Massachusetts job postings on the career site included salary information as of February 2025.

Whether the law will fulfill its stated goal of closing race- and gender-based pay gaps remains an open question in Massachusetts and beyond. Nationwide, women still earn a median salary that’s lower than what men earn—a difference that widened over the past two years. And while some research indicates pay transparency laws in states like Colorado have helped narrow this gap, advocates recently told HR Brew there are larger structural factors at play that businesses need to address.

Nevertheless, many HR teams now see pay transparency as a business imperative, a point echoed by the Massachusetts attorney general’s office in its blog post on the subject: “Beyond ensuring that workplaces in the Commonwealth are more equitable, the Pay Transparency Act will help strengthen the Massachusetts economy and its competitiveness by attracting and retaining the best talent,” the office posits.