Publishing salary ranges is now required in a growing number of states and voluntary in plenty of other companies. What gets published is a number, or a band. What employees actually want to know is how that number was decided and what moves it.
But a range with no explanation attached is confusing, so people answer for themselves in the absence of anything better.
This article covers the difference between transparency, equity, and clarity, where published ranges create problems inside a company, and how to build a compensation system employees can follow without a translator.
Transparency, Equity, and Clarity Are Three Different Things
Transparency is visibility. Salary ranges in postings, bonus plans written down, and an honest answer when someone asks how decisions get made.
Equity is the outcome. People doing comparable work paid comparably, regardless of gender, race, or other protected traits. You can be completely transparent and still be inequitable. Publishing the numbers just means everyone can see it.
Clarity is the part most companies skip. It answers how ranges are built, what separates the bottom of a band from the top, which factors decide where a specific person sits today, and what has to change for them to move.
Turn on the lights and people can see the room. Clarity is the map of it.
What the Law Now Requires
Several U.S. states and cities require salary ranges in job postings or on request, including Colorado, California, New York, Washington, and New York City.
Each one has its own thresholds and disclosure triggers, so read the actual guidance rather than a summary:
- Colorado Equal Pay for Equal Work Act guidance
- California SB 1162 overview
- New York State pay transparency
- New York City salary transparency law
- Washington State salary and benefit disclosure
The EU’s Pay Transparency Directive goes further and reaches many more employers, with obligations aimed squarely at the gender pay gap across member states.
Law isn’t the only driver. Gartner projected that most employers would expand pay transparency practices in some form, and research reviewed by Harvard Business Review indicates transparency efforts can narrow gender wage gaps, though the effect depends heavily on whether clear rules and accountability come with it.
That last condition does most of the work and gets quoted least often.
Where Published Ranges Create Problems
You can comply perfectly and still make things worse internally. Two failure modes account for most of it.
Wide bands with no explanation
A role posted at $90,000 to $180,000 reads as a mystery box. Is the spread about scope? Performance? Location? Tenure? How hard did someone negotiate? When nothing is said, people guess, and the guesses run negative. Someone sitting at $112,000 now has evidence, in their mind, that they are being underpaid by $68,000.
Same title, different pay
Two people compare notes, find a gap, and conclude the company is either careless or playing favorites. Sometimes that’s correct.
Often the difference is a level distinction, a skill premium, or a market adjustment that nobody ever explained, and a five-minute explanation would have resolved it before it became a complaint.
Here’s an example of cloud computing salaries to illustrate this.
Bryan Henry, President of PeterMD, a men’s health telemedicine clinic where teams combine clinical expertise with specialized healthcare operations, notes that those differences in experience and responsibility have to be reflected clearly in how compensation is structured.
He explains, “Employees don’t just want to know what the range is. They want to understand why they sit where they do within it. If clinical specialization, experience, scope, or performance changes the number, those criteria need to be visible.
Otherwise, even a legitimate pay difference can look arbitrary, and that’s where transparency starts creating frustration instead of trust.”
Early rollouts in some cities showed how fast this moves. Ranges went out extremely broad, candidates fixated on the top number, current employees questioned why they weren’t near it, and employers spent the following weeks issuing clarifications they should have written first.
Most pay frustration isn’t about the figure. It’s about not knowing the rules. People who don’t know the rules will write their own version, and theirs is usually less charitable than the truth.
What Companies That Got This Right Did Differently
Buffer publishes a salary formula covering role, level, and location, keeps it publicly viewable, and explains adjustments as they happen over time.
GitLab keeps its compensation philosophy and calculators in the public handbook, where geography, job family, and level are shown interacting. Candidates arrive at offer conversations already knowing roughly what to expect.
The U.S. federal General Schedule is worth a look for a different reason. Grades, steps, and locality adjustments are published in a table. Anyone can find their own square and see exactly what tenure and grade movement are worth. Simple and visible beats elegant and unexplained.
How to Build the System
This isn’t a memo. It’s a structure plus the people who can explain it, and the second half is where rollouts usually fail.
Write the compensation philosophy in plain language
State your target market position, like, say, the 60th percentile. Say how often you reprice roles and which market data you use. Two pages, no jargon.
The same discipline applies to the documents that sit behind compensation decisions. Policies, employment agreements, and other records need to be easy to retrieve and consistently maintained, which is where contract management software can help keep the underlying documentation organized instead of scattered across inboxes and folders.
Build levels before you build ranges
Distinct levels, not a wall of titles. Define scope, impact, skills, and behaviors at each one so a person can look at the level above theirs and recognize the difference in concrete terms rather than adjectives.
That distinction matters in businesses where similar-looking roles can involve very different work. An ecommerce business producing DTF transfers for blank apparel, for example, might have employees across design, printing, production, fulfillment, customer service, and sales, making clearly defined levels more useful than relying on broad job titles alone.
Ranges built on top of vague levels inherit the vagueness.
Define what min, midpoint, and max actually mean
Most ranges run 30 to 50% wide from minimum to maximum. Say what each boundary represents and what typically puts someone there. Explain compa-ratio in a sentence a non-specialist understands.
Then set placement guidelines and publish them: new hires generally land between X and Y depending on skills and experience, promotions target the midpoint, and here’s what happens when someone reaches the top of their band and stays in the role.
Say how location works
If you pay differently by geography, publish the approach and the tiers.
If you’re location-agnostic, say that explicitly and explain how you keep it fair when someone moves. Ambiguity here generates more speculation than almost anything else, particularly on distributed teams.
The same applies to variable pay. Bonus targets, eligibility, performance multipliers, equity refresh cycles, all of it on one page. If an employee can’t calculate their own likely bonus range, they don’t really know what they’re paid.
Train managers before you announce anything
The framework lives or dies in a one-on-one conversation with a manager who either can or cannot explain it.
Role-play the hard versions.
Someone at the bottom of a band who thinks they should be at the midpoint. Someone who found out a peer earns more. Someone asking what specifically gets them to the next level, who deserves a real answer instead of a deflection to HR. Give managers talking points, an internal FAQ, and a decision tree for the questions they aren’t authorized to answer.
Pair all of it with regular pay equity analysis, and run the analysis first. Transparency invites scrutiny by design, and if the underlying numbers won’t survive scrutiny, publishing them accelerates a problem instead of solving it.
Then keep communicating. Launch live, post the resources internally, refresh them quarterly, and take anonymous questions with answers posted publicly. The quarterly refresh matters more than the launch event.
What You Get When It Works
Fewer whispered conversations. Candidates showing up to interviews with realistic expectations, which saves everyone several rounds. Managers who stop routing every pay question to HR because they can handle it themselves.
Trust is the underrated one. People extend more good faith to leadership when they feel informed, and that reservoir gets spent on everything else you need them to accept later.
Research suggests a well-explained pay framework can narrow wage gaps and improve perceptions of fairness, and reputation follows.
Companies known for explaining pay decisions consistently attract candidates who were not otherwise looking.
Where to Start
Your job postings are where the compensation system meets the public, and a well-built framework can still get undone by a posting that publishes a band with no context.
Ongig helps talent teams write and manage job descriptions that are clear, consistent, and compliant with pay transparency laws across every state you hire in.
