Massachusetts Pay Transparency Law: Posting & Reporting Rules
Massachusetts pairs posting rules with pay data reporting. Here's what employers need to disclose and document.
Rovaryn Digital · June 13, 2026
The Massachusetts Deadline Has Passed — Is Your Posting Ready?
Your Massachusetts job posting is scheduled to go live Thursday. The salary field is blank. Your HR generalist is asking what number to put in, your recruiting platform is asking for a minimum and maximum, and somewhere in a recent email thread a manager said, "Just put 'competitive' — that's what everyone does."
That approach stopped being defensible on October 29, 2025.
On that date, An Act Relative to Salary Range Transparency took effect for Massachusetts employers, adding the Commonwealth to the growing list of US jurisdictions that require salary ranges — not salary vague-ness — in job postings. As of 2026, more than 16 states plus Washington D.C. have enacted pay-transparency posting mandates, with Delaware joining in 2027 (Paycor / Nesco Resource, 2026). Massachusetts is among the most recently activated, and it pairs its posting rule with a separate pay data reporting obligation that catches a different (and larger) group of employers.
By the end of this article you will understand exactly what the Massachusetts pay transparency law requires, who it covers, what the penalty ladder looks like, and how to build a salary range that holds up if the Massachusetts Attorney General's office ever asks for documentation.
Who the Massachusetts Pay Transparency Law Covers
The posting rule: 25 or more Massachusetts employees
An Act Relative to Salary Range Transparency applies to public and private employers with 25 or more Massachusetts employees (Greenberg Traurig, 2025). If your headcount in the Commonwealth reaches that threshold, you must include a pay range in every covered job posting — whether the posting is for a new hire, an internal transfer, or a promotion.
The law requires that the disclosed range reflect a good-faith estimate of the compensation you actually intend to pay. This is an important distinction from a simple "we'll see what the market says" placeholder. A good-faith salary range is one anchored in something you can document: a wage benchmark, an internal pay structure, a comparable-role analysis, or some combination. "Good faith" is the standard the Attorney General's office will evaluate if a complaint is filed — and a range you cannot explain is not a good-faith range.
The obligation extends to third parties — staffing agencies and other intermediaries posting on your behalf must also include the pay range (Greenberg Traurig, 2025). If you use a recruiting agency, confirm they have your ranges before the posting goes live.
The reporting rule: 100 or more Massachusetts employees
A separate, parallel obligation applies to employers with 100 or more Massachusetts employees: they must submit EEO-style workforce demographic and pay data on an annual basis, with the first reporting deadline of February 1, 2025 (Choate Hall & Stewart / Mintz, 2026). This reporting requirement is distinct from the posting rule — it is not a substitute for including a range in postings, and it is not triggered by the same 25-employee threshold.
If your organization is already filing a federal EEO-1 report, the Massachusetts reporting obligation uses similar occupational and pay-band categories, but verify the current submission format and portal with the Massachusetts Attorney General's office before your next filing cycle.
What Must Appear in the Posting
Under the Massachusetts pay transparency law, a covered job posting must include a pay range — defined as the minimum and maximum salary or hourly rate the employer reasonably and in good faith expects to pay for the position (Greenberg Traurig, 2025). The law does not require you to disclose the full compensation structure (equity, bonuses, benefits) in the posting itself, but you must be able to document the methodology behind the range if asked.
Three practical obligations follow from this:
A real minimum and a real maximum. A range is not a single figure. "$60,000" is not a range — "$60,000–$75,000" is. Posting a single number without the spread does not satisfy the requirement.
Good-faith grounding. The range should correspond to what you would actually pay a qualified candidate. A range of "$30,000–$300,000" for a mid-level project manager role is not a good-faith representation — it is a shield, and enforcement agencies have begun to scrutinize artificially wide ranges in other jurisdictions as well.
Record retention. The posting itself, and the pay-range information associated with each position, should be retained as part of your HR documentation. While Massachusetts law does not specify a retention period in the same terms as Illinois (which mandates five years — Illinois DOL, 2025), building a consistent retention policy across all jurisdictions is a sound compliance practice. Consult the Massachusetts Attorney General's office or employment counsel for the current guidance on recordkeeping obligations.
For a detailed breakdown of what elements belong in a compliant posting — beyond the salary range itself — see our guide on what to include in a salary range posting.
The Massachusetts Penalty Structure
The penalty ladder under the Massachusetts pay transparency law escalates by offense (Mintz, 2025):
| Offense | Penalty |
|---|---|
| 1st violation | Warning |
| 2nd violation | Up to $500 |
| 3rd violation | Up to $1,000 |
| 4th and subsequent | Up to $25,000 |
Two features of this structure matter for compliance planning.
First, there is a two-business-day cure period that runs through October 29, 2027 — a two-year grace window from the effective date during which an employer can correct a non-compliant posting within two business days of receiving notice before a formal violation is assessed (Mintz, 2025). This cure period is temporary; after October 29, 2027, violations are assessed without the opportunity to cure.
Second, the escalation is per-offense, and enforcement agencies in other transparency-law states have interpreted "each posting" as a separate potential violation. California's SB 1162, for example, treats the same role posted on five platforms without a range as potentially five violations (Employment Law Aid, 2026). Massachusetts' enforcement posture will likely develop through guidance from the AGO after the law is active — another reason to verify current enforcement interpretation with the Massachusetts AGO or with employment counsel rather than relying solely on the statutory text.
For a side-by-side view of how Massachusetts' penalties compare to other state transparency laws, see pay transparency penalties explained.
Building a Defensible Massachusetts Salary Range
What "defensible" means in practice
A defensible salary range is one you can explain to three audiences: a candidate who asks how you set it, a manager who needs to make an offer within it, and an attorney or regulator who wants to see your methodology documentation. The Massachusetts pay transparency law does not prescribe a specific methodology — it requires good faith and documentation. That means the burden of choosing a methodology falls on you.
Salary range (also called a pay band) is the span from a band minimum to a band maximum, anchored at a midpoint (the midpoint — often the market median for the role and geography — is the wage at which fully qualified, fully performing employees are targeted to sit). Range spread is the width of that band expressed as a percentage of the midpoint: a band from $60,000 to $80,000 has a midpoint of $70,000 and a spread of approximately 29%. Wider spreads suit roles with long learning curves or wide seniority variation; narrower spreads suit well-defined, lower-complexity roles.
Market median (also called the 50th percentile) is the wage below which 50% of workers in a comparable occupation and geography earn. Percentile is the general term: the 25th percentile is the wage below which 25% of workers earn; the 75th percentile is the wage below which 75% earn. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (BLS OEWS) program publishes these percentiles for more than 800 occupations, drawn from a sample of approximately 1.1 million establishments (BLS, May 2025). This data is publicly available, free, and legally defensible as a benchmark source.
Using BLS OEWS data for Massachusetts
The BLS OEWS program publishes state-level wage estimates, including Massachusetts-specific figures, annually. The May 2025 OEWS national, state, and metro estimates were released May 15, 2026 (BLS, 2026). Confirm the current Massachusetts state-level release year and download the occupation-specific percentile estimates directly from bls.gov/oes before building or updating your ranges — wage levels shift year over year, and a range anchored in outdated data is harder to defend as a good-faith estimate.
The national-level figures in our verified data library illustrate the spread across occupations. As one example: accountants and auditors (SOC 13-2011) had a national median of $81,680, a 10th-percentile wage of $52,780, and a 90th-percentile wage of $141,420 (BLS OOH, May 2024). Massachusetts tends to run above national medians in professional and technical occupations — confirm the live MA state estimate at bls.gov/oes rather than applying the national figure directly.
Worked example (illustrative model — not a BLS assertion): Suppose the BLS OEWS MA state estimate for a given role returns a 50th-percentile annual wage of $80,000. An employer targeting the market median as the midpoint, with a 40% range spread (±20% around the midpoint), would set: minimum = $64,000, midpoint = $80,000, maximum = $96,000. That band is what goes in the posting. The spreadsheet or tool that produced it — with the BLS source, release year, and spread methodology documented — is what goes in the compliance file.
For a step-by-step walkthrough of building a salary range from scratch, see our guide how to build a salary range.
Documentation: The Layer Most Employers Skip
Posting the range is the visible compliance step. Documentation is the one that matters when things escalate.
When the Massachusetts AGO receives a complaint, or when an employment attorney is conducting due diligence ahead of an acquisition, the question is not only "did you post a range?" but "how did you arrive at it?" A range pulled from a job board or a competitor's posting has no defensible methodology behind it. A range built from BLS OEWS state data, with a documented spread rationale and a timestamped build date, does.
At minimum, your documentation file for each posted role should include:
- The wage source (dataset name, geography, release year, and the specific percentile used as the anchor)
- The range spread methodology (how wide the band is and why — seniority variation, internal equity, career ladder structure)
- The build date (so you can demonstrate the data was current at time of posting)
- Approval or sign-off (who reviewed the range and when)
If your current process is a one-off Google search or a job-seeker salary estimator, you have data but no audit trail. The range may be in the right neighborhood, but you cannot produce the documentation a regulator or attorney needs. See our full framework for multi-state compliance in the pay transparency resource hub, and review the current landscape across all active state laws at pay transparency laws by state.
Massachusetts in the Broader Compliance Picture
Massachusetts does not exist in isolation. If your organization posts roles that are open to candidates in multiple states — remote positions, in particular — a single posting may trigger the Massachusetts requirement, the New York State requirement (effective September 17, 2023, applying to employers with four or more employees), the Illinois requirement (effective January 1, 2025, applying to employers with 15 or more employees), and others simultaneously (NY State DOL, 2023; Illinois DOL, 2025). The most conservative approach for multi-state or remote roles is to apply the posting requirements of each jurisdiction where the role could be performed or where the employer meets the employee-count threshold.
Confirm your specific obligations — including whether Massachusetts counts remote employees in other states toward your MA headcount — with the Massachusetts AGO or with employment counsel. Law and enforcement guidance in this area continues to evolve.
Next Step: A Compliance-Ready Template for Massachusetts
The Massachusetts pay transparency law requires a good-faith range, documented methodology, and — for larger employers — annual pay data reporting. Building that infrastructure from scratch in a spreadsheet takes hours and produces a file with no audit trail, no data-vintage watermark, and no compliance-formatted output.
Our Pay Transparency Compliance Kit, available in the Salary Range Builder store, includes posting templates pre-formatted for Massachusetts (and other active transparency-law states), a range-methodology documentation worksheet, and a penalty-reference summary by jurisdiction. It is designed for the HR generalist who needs a defensible file by Thursday, not a multi-week enterprise implementation.
If you are ready to move beyond one-off templates to a repeatable, auditable range-building workflow, see our pricing page — the Professional plan includes the US geographic adjustment calculator, BLS OEWS-grounded range outputs, and watermark-free PDF documentation starting at $349/month.
Download the Pay Transparency Compliance Kit and have a Massachusetts-compliant posting template in your hands today: /store/pay-transparency-compliance-kit.
Legal notice: This article describes the Massachusetts pay transparency law as it stands based on publicly available statutory text and legal analysis. It is not legal advice. Requirements, enforcement guidance, and penalty interpretation change — always confirm the current rule with the Massachusetts Attorney General's office or with qualified employment counsel before acting.
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