Location-Based Range Sets: One Role, Multiple Compliant Ranges

The Friday Problem: One Job Title, Three Offices, and a Posting Due in Two Hours

Your senior software developer role just got approved. You need to post it today — one listing for your Denver office, one for your New York office, and one for remote candidates who could be anywhere from Austin to Atlanta. Each location has a different labor market. Two of those three locations trigger state pay-transparency posting laws with real per-violation penalties. And every range needs a documented methodology behind it in case your employment attorney asks.

If you are managing this in a spreadsheet, you know exactly what happens next: three tabs, three versions, and a nagging question about which one was updated last. By the end of this guide, you will know precisely how to structure location-based range sets — one role, multiple compliant ranges — so that every posting is defensible, every location is accounted for, and your methodology is documented in a single traceable record.

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What a Location-Based Range Set Actually Is

A location-based range set is a structured collection of salary bands for the same job, each calibrated to a distinct labor market or work-location tier. The role — its duties, level, and career framework — does not change. What changes is the external wage benchmark that anchors the band in each geography, and (where applicable) the compliance requirements that govern what must appear in the posting.

A complete range set for a single role might include:

• San Francisco, CA — anchored to Bay Area or California-statewide BLS OEWS percentiles (BLS OEWS, May 2024)
• Denver, CO — anchored to Colorado metro or statewide percentiles
• New York, NY — anchored to New York metro-area percentiles
• Remote / Tier 1 — anchored to a defined national or regional benchmark your organization has adopted as policy

Each entry in that set carries its own minimum, midpoint, and maximum — and its own compliance status. Managing them as a set, rather than as independent one-off spreadsheets, is what prevents version chaos and keeps your methodology coherent across the organization.

For a deeper look at how geographic wage differences are measured and interpreted, see our guide to geographic pay differentials explained.

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Why Location-Based Range Sets Are Now an Operational Requirement

Pay-transparency laws do not care about your spreadsheet workflow. They care about the posting.

As of 2026, 16 states plus Washington D.C. mandate salary disclosure in job postings, with Delaware joining in 2027 (Paycor / Nesco Resource, 2026). Among the jurisdictions most relevant to multi-location employers:

• Colorado fines employers $500–$10,000 per violation, with each non-compliant posting treated as a separate violation (Colorado General Assembly, SB19-085, 2019; amended Jan 1, 2024). As of July 1, 2024, Colorado's CDLE had assessed $238,000 in fines across 1,634 complaints (Trusaic citing Colorado CDLE, 2024). Confirm the current enforcement threshold with the Colorado CDLE before acting.
• California — SB 1162 / Labor Code §432.3 — carries civil penalties of $100–$10,000 per violation for employers with 15 or more employees (California Legislative Information, 2022; effective Jan 1, 2023). Posting the same role on multiple platforms without a range may constitute separate violations per posting (Employment Law Aid, 2026). Verify the current rule with the California DIR.
• New York State requires employers with four or more employees to include a salary range in postings for roles performed at least in part in New York, with penalties up to $3,000 per violation (NY State DOL, 2023). New York City's separate ordinance (in effect since Nov 1, 2022) carries civil penalties up to $250,000 per violation (Trusaic, 2025). Verify both rules with the NY State DOL and the NYC Commission on Human Rights.
• Washington State requires employers with 15 or more employees to disclose a wage scale or salary range plus a general description of benefits; as of July 27, 2025 amendments, statutory damages run $100–$5,000 per applicant, plus attorney fees (Epstein Becker Green, 2025). Verify the current rule with Washington L&I.

The practical consequence: a multi-location employer posting the same role in Colorado, California, and New York faces three different statutory frameworks simultaneously. A single universal range satisfies none of them well — it either overstates the market in a lower-cost location (creating internal equity exposure) or understates it in a high-cost one (making you uncompetitive and potentially still non-compliant).

For a full breakdown of what each state's posting law requires, see our multi-state hiring compliance guide.

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Building the Ranges: From One BLS Anchor to Multiple Calibrated Bands

Every compliant location-based range set starts with external wage data. The foundation is BLS OEWS (Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics) data, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes annually for over 800 occupations at the national, state, and metropolitan statistical area (MSA) level.

Key terms defined:

• Market median — the 50th percentile wage for a given occupation and geography: the point below which half of surveyed workers in that role earn. This is your primary anchor.
• Percentile — the wage below which a given share of workers in that occupation and geography earn. The BLS OEWS reports five percentiles: 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th.
• Range spread — how wide the band is, expressed as a percentage of the midpoint (or sometimes of the minimum). A 50% spread on a $100,000 midpoint produces a band of $75,000–$125,000.
• Midpoint — the center of your salary band, typically set at or near the market median for a target competitive position.
• Range minimum and maximum — the lower and upper bounds of the posted range, derived from the midpoint and the spread you've defined.

A worked example (illustrative model)

Take software developers (SOC 15-1252). The national median is $133,080 (BLS OOH, May 2024). Your company targets the 50th percentile as its midpoint with a 50% spread.

Location	BLS Anchor Used	Illustrative Midpoint	Band Min (−25%)	Band Max (+25%)
National / Remote Tier	National median	$133,080	$99,810	$166,350
Colorado (state)	CO state median*	[pull from live OEWS]	—	—
New York Metro	NY-NJ-PA MSA*	[pull from live OEWS]	—	—
California	CA state median*	[pull from live OEWS]	—	—

*State and MSA-level percentile figures must be pulled from the live BLS OEWS data at bls.gov/oes for the most current reference year. The national figure above is from BLS OOH, May 2024. Do not use this table's worked-example arithmetic as a substitute for live state/MSA data.

The arithmetic here is a teaching model — your actual inputs must come from the current BLS OEWS state or MSA release for the specific occupation and geography. For a step-by-step walkthrough of the full range-build process, see our guide on how to build a salary range.

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Managing Location-Based Range Sets Without Spreadsheet Sprawl

The real operational challenge is not building the first version of each range. It is maintaining them — keeping every location's band current when BLS OEWS releases updated estimates, tracking which ranges have been posted and when, and producing documentation that holds up if a state agency or attorney asks for it.

Three disciplines separate a manageable location-based range set from a folder of competing spreadsheets:

1. One source of record per role, not one spreadsheet per location. Each job should have a single canonical record that carries all location variants together — their anchors, their spreads, their effective dates, and the BLS dataset vintage year. When OEWS data updates (the May 2025 national, state, and metro estimates were released May 15, 2026 — BLS, 2026), you update one record and every location variant reflects the new data.

2. Explicit data-vintage watermarking. Every range in your set should carry a visible tag: the BLS OEWS reference period used and the date the range was built or last reviewed. This is not bureaucratic overhead — it is the answer to the question "how did you arrive at this number?" that your employment attorney may ask.

3. A defined remote-work tier policy. Remote roles that could be filled anywhere are the hardest case in location-based range sets. You need a documented policy decision: Will you pay to the candidate's location? To the role's originating office? To a defined national benchmark? There is no single correct answer, but there is a correct process: decide, document it, apply it consistently, and anchor it in BLS data. See our remote pay policy tiers guide for a framework to structure that decision.

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Connecting Location Ranges to Compliant Postings

Once your range sets are built, the posting step is where compliance either holds or breaks down. A few operational rules:

• Post the location-specific range, not the widest possible universal range. Posting a national range that spans Denver minimum to San Francisco maximum satisfies no jurisdiction particularly well and invites scrutiny in enforcement-active states.
• Include the range in every external posting in a covered jurisdiction. California's SB 1162 requires employers with 15+ employees to include the pay range in all postings — including third-party platforms (Employment Law Aid, 2026). Verify with the California DIR.
• Keep the posting record. Illinois requires employers to retain pay-scale and benefit information for each position for five years (Greenberg Traurig / Illinois DOL, 2024). Ontario (effective Jan 1, 2026) requires employers to retain each publicly advertised posting for three years after it is taken down (HRPA, 2026). Verify retention requirements with the relevant issuing authority for your jurisdiction before relying on any timeline.
• Document the methodology, not just the output. The range you post is what candidates see. The methodology — which BLS dataset, which percentile, which spread, which location — is what you show counsel.

For a broader compliance orientation across multiple states, the salary range resource hub collects jurisdiction-specific guidance in one place.

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A Simpler Starting Point Before You Scale

If you are building location-based range sets for the first time and your current process is a mix of BLS.gov lookups and manually maintained spreadsheets, the Compensation Benchmarking Spreadsheet (Excel) is a structured starting point — pre-formatted for BLS OEWS input, with a built-in range-spread calculator and data-vintage fields so your first location range set is documented from day one.

When the number of roles, locations, or posting jurisdictions makes a spreadsheet genuinely unmanageable — three offices, a remote tier, five covered states, and a posting audit trail your attorney can actually read — that is when purpose-built software pays for itself. The features overview shows how Salary Range Builder's Business plan handles multi-location range sets natively: separate range variants per location within a single role record, BLS data integration with vintage watermarking, and compliance-ready PDF output for each jurisdiction.

You can explore the platform free for 14 days — no commitment required. See pricing for a full tier comparison, or start your trial directly from the pricing page.

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The Defensible Range Is a Documented Range

Location-based range sets are not a complexity to be managed around — they are the operational reality of any employer with more than one office or a remote hiring program in a pay-transparency-law state. The question is not whether to maintain separate, calibrated ranges per location. The question is whether your methodology is traceable, your data is current, and your documentation is something you would hand an employment attorney without hesitation.

Build the set once, from authoritative BLS OEWS data, with a documented methodology and an explicit data vintage. Maintain it as a single record. Post the location-specific range every time. That is a defensible compensation program — and it is the standard that pay-transparency enforcement is already measuring you against.