Why Job Postings List Such Wide Salary Ranges
Pay transparency laws forced companies to publish salary ranges. Few laws say how wide those ranges can be, and research shows women pay the price.
Pull up a job posting today and there's a decent chance it lists a salary range so wide it barely qualifies as information. That's not a coincidence, and it isn't sloppy HR work, either. It's the predictable result of a wave of state laws that require employers to publish pay ranges, combined with employers' own discovery that the law rarely says how wide a "range" is allowed to be.
The laws spread faster than the rules got specific
Pay transparency requirements have expanded quickly. Virginia became the 13th state to require salary ranges in job postings when its own law took effect July 1, 2026, joining California, Colorado, New York and Washington, D.C. among others. The effect on the market is visible: roughly 60% of postings on Indeed now include salary information, up from just 18% in 2020, according to Indeed's Hiring Lab.
What most of those laws don't specify is a maximum range width. A handful, like Colorado's, require employers to describe "a general description of all of the benefits and other compensation" alongside the number. California requires only the pay scale itself. Almost none of them define how far apart the top and bottom of a range are allowed to sit, which leaves employers free to satisfy the letter of a disclosure law with a range broad enough to reveal almost nothing useful.
New research shows the workaround has a real cost, and it isn't evenly distributed
A study led by Cornell ILR School researcher Alice Lee, published Feb. 16 in the Journal of Applied Psychology, ran four separate studies, including an analysis of nearly 10 million U.S. job postings, and found that women consistently prefer narrower salary ranges than men do, a preference tied to less assertive negotiating once an offer is on the table.
"Across our four studies, we consistently found that women show a stronger preference for jobs with narrower salary ranges compared to men, and that this preference is associated with less assertive negotiation behaviors. In other words, the way these laws are being implemented may be perpetuating the very pay gaps they were designed to close."
Alice Lee, assistant professor of organizational behavior, Cornell ILR School
The effect compounds. Applicants who gravitated toward narrower ranges also negotiated less, asked for less when they did negotiate, and reported more satisfaction with a midpoint offer than a stronger negotiating posture would predict. Lee's team notes that starting salary has a multiplying effect on a career, since raises and future offers are frequently anchored to it.
There's a fix embedded in the same research, and it's a modest one. In a fourth experiment, the team found that pairing a wide range with a short, plain-language explanation of the typical starting salary and how final offers get determined eliminated the gender gap in both application decisions and negotiating behavior. The problem isn't the range's width alone. It's the width combined with total silence about what determines the number.
Regulators built in a check, but it's soft
Most state laws include some version of a "good faith" requirement: the posted range has to genuinely reflect what an employer expects to pay for the role, not an artificially wide band designed to satisfy a compliance checkbox while preserving maximum negotiating leverage. Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, whose state's law leaves that same gap, acknowledged as much directly: an employer could legally post a range of $35,000 to $95,000 for a single role and still be in compliance.
"It doesn't necessarily serve the benefit, which is intended to provide a bit of clarity for a potential employee related to what the salary range would legitimately be. You can then walk in and say, 'OK, the top end of the range is $95,000, I'm here asking for this job, I'm asking for $95,000.' They can always play games with the lower limit, but the upper limit is a piece of it that does matter."
Gov. Abigail Spanberger, Virginia
Enforcement, where it exists, leans light. Virginia's law caps a first violation at $1,000 and later violations at $5,000 each, and the state's early posture is educational rather than punitive; officials there have said they want to give employers time to comply before pursuing formal enforcement action. A penalty structure built around a first warning does little to discourage a range that's merely unhelpful rather than clearly deceptive.
There's a second, quieter effect showing up in the data: some employers responding to transparency mandates aren't just widening ranges, they're compressing them downward. CNBC reporting has found that advertised pay in some newly regulated markets grew more slowly than expected once ranges became mandatory, as employers recalibrated the bottom of a range they knew would now be public. Transparency was supposed to push wages up by giving workers leverage; for at least some roles, the incentive has cut the other way.
What a job seeker can actually do with a wide range
None of this makes salary ranges useless — even a wide one narrows the field compared with no number at all, and it gives an applicant a legitimate opening to ask directly where a specific role, given specific experience, is likely to land within it. The research suggests that's exactly the question worth asking in a first conversation, since the absence of that context is what the Cornell study identified as the actual problem, more than the width of the number itself. A range with no explanation is a compliance artifact. A range with an explanation is closer to what these laws were supposed to produce in the first place.
