Massachusetts Pay Transparency Law: What the Salary Range Rules Ask of a Small Employer
Massachusetts pay transparency law for employers: the 25 employee threshold, what job postings must show, the cure window, and the penalty ladder.
Massachusetts Pay Transparency Law
Who the salary range rules cover, how to count your 25 employees, and what a compliant posting looks like
The first question a Massachusetts founder asks me about this law is almost never the right one. They ask whether they have to publish salaries. The answer that actually decides their exposure is a payroll arithmetic problem: what was your average Massachusetts headcount across every pay period of last year, and is that number 25 or more?
I have watched two companies of similar size land on opposite sides of that line. One ran a summer surge that pushed its average over the threshold without anyone noticing. The other had 31 people on the books in December and an average of 22, because most of them started in the fall. Same city, same industry, completely different obligations.
This guide is about Massachusetts specifically. It covers who the salary range rules reach, how to run the headcount average the Attorney General's Office describes, what a posting has to contain, what the cure window does, and what the annual wage data report asks of larger employers. If you need the fifty state picture instead, the pay transparency laws overview compares thresholds across states. I built FirstHR so a small team can keep records like the headcount worksheet below without a dedicated HR person, but the compliance decision here is yours to make first.
What the Law Requires
A covered Massachusetts employer must disclose the pay range for a position in three situations: in the posting for that position, to an employee or applicant who asks for it, and to an employee being offered a promotion or transfer into a new position with different responsibilities. That is the whole of the disclosure duty.
The statute is Chapter 141 of the Acts of 2024, sometimes called the Frances Perkins Workplace Equity Act. It added two sections to chapter 149 of the General Laws. Section 105F carries the posting and disclosure rules. Section 105E carries a separate wage data reporting duty for larger employers.
What the law does not do matters as much. It does not require you to publish individual salaries. It does not require benefits disclosure in the advertisement, which is a point of difference from some other jurisdictions. It does not create a private lawsuit. And it does not set any pay floor beyond the state minimum wage.
Who Is Covered
Coverage turns on two thresholds, and they measure different things. The 25 employee threshold governs postings and is an average across last year's pay periods. The 100 employee threshold governs the wage data report and is triggered by reaching that headcount at any point in the prior calendar year.
That asymmetry trips people up. A company can be under 100 on an averaged basis and still owe the report, because the report test is a peak test rather than an average. Read each threshold against its own section rather than assuming one rule covers both.
| Massachusetts headcount | Post a range in job ads | Disclose on request | Range for promotions and transfers | Annual wage data report |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 25 (prior year average) | Not required | Not required | Not required | Not required |
| 25 to 99 | Required | Required | Required | Not required |
| 100 or more at any point in the prior year, EEO-1 filer | Required | Required | Required | Required |
Notice that the middle band is where most growing Massachusetts businesses sit. Twenty five employees is not a large company. A single restaurant group, a two location dental practice or a thirty person agency crosses it without ever having hired an HR manager, which is exactly why the rule catches people unprepared.
How to Count Your Employees
Guidance from the Attorney General's Office describes the method plainly: add the number of employees on the payroll during each pay period of the year, then divide by the number of pay periods. A pay period with nobody on the payroll counts as zero rather than being dropped from the denominator.
Full time, part time, seasonal and temporary employees all go into the count. The filter is not hours worked or job type. The filter is whether the person was on the payroll in that pay period and whether their primary place of work is Massachusetts.
Run the arithmetic even when the answer looks obvious. A company that peaks at 40 in July and sits at 18 the rest of the year can land under 25 on the average, and a company that never exceeds 27 will always be over. The only way to know which one you are is to do it.
Remote Workers and Primary Place of Work
The test is primary place of work, meaning where the employee performs the majority of their job duties. It follows the person rather than the company address, which is why a business with no Massachusetts office can still be covered and a Boston headquartered company can have employees who fall outside the count.
Guidance also brings in remote roles that report to a Massachusetts worksite. A fully remote position that reports into your Cambridge office is a Massachusetts posting even though the person may never sit there. That is the rule most likely to surprise a distributed team.
If you hire across state lines, the practical answer is to write one posting standard that satisfies the strictest state you recruit in and apply it everywhere. Maintaining separate advertisement templates per state is how a compliant careers page drifts out of compliance six months later.
What Counts as a Job Posting
A posting is any advertisement or announcement intended to recruit applicants for a specific position whose primary place of work is Massachusetts. The format does not matter. Internal postings, external postings, job board listings and advertisements placed by a third party recruiter are all covered.
The third party point deserves its own line. If a staffing agency or search firm advertises your role, the obligation is still yours. Employers who fixed their careers page and forgot the agency version of the same requisition have a gap they do not know about.
The cleanest structural fix is to attach the range to the requisition rather than to each advertisement. If the range lives in the requisition record next to the job description, every channel that publishes the role inherits it. Building it into the general job posting requirements you already follow prevents the drift.
| Channel | Covered | What usually goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Your own careers page | Yes | Nothing, this is the one employers fix first |
| Third party job boards | Yes | An old listing left live with the pre-effective-date text |
| Recruiter or staffing agency advertisement | Yes | The agency uses its own template with no range |
| Internal promotion announcement | Yes | Treated as informal news rather than a posting |
| Social media post naming a specific open role | Yes | Written by a founder in a hurry, with no range |
| Referral request to your own network naming the role | Yes | Nobody thinks of a message as an advertisement |
What a Good Faith Range Looks Like
The statute asks for the annual salary range or hourly wage range that the employer reasonably and in good faith expects to pay for that specific position at that time. Two words carry the weight: specific and expects.
Specific rules out a single range pasted across an entire job family. Expects rules out a range you have no intention of paying at either end. Guidance addresses overly broad ranges directly, treating a span that does not accurately represent the pay for the role as a failure to comply rather than a technicality.
| Posting text | Assessment | Why |
|---|---|---|
| $68,000 to $82,000 per year | Defensible | A specific band you would actually pay for this role |
| $24.00 to $28.50 per hour | Defensible | Hourly roles use an hourly range, not an annualized guess |
| $45,000 to $190,000 per year | Risky | A span this wide communicates nothing about the role |
| Starting at $60,000 | Risky | An open top is not a range |
| Competitive, depending on experience | Not compliant | No numbers at all |
| $50,000 base plus anticipated commission of $20,000 to $35,000 | Defensible | Commission roles disclose the anticipated commission component |
For commission, piece rate and tipped roles, guidance asks employers to disclose information about the anticipated commission, piece rate or tip income. A base wage alone on a role where most earnings come from commission does not give an applicant a usable number.
Setting a range you can defend is a compensation exercise before it is a compliance one. If you have never priced your roles against external data, run salary benchmarking before you publish, because the published range becomes the anchor for every negotiation that follows.
Requests, Promotions, and Transfers
Beyond postings, two disclosure triggers operate on request or on offer. An employee who holds a position, or an applicant for a position, can ask for the pay range and must be given it. And an employee offered a promotion or transfer into a position with different responsibilities must be given the range for that new position.
The promotion trigger is the one that catches careful employers. A company can make its careers page perfect and still be out of compliance because internal moves happen in a conversation, with the number arriving only in the final offer.
Massachusetts also bans salary history questions through its Equal Pay Act, which predates the range rules. Handle both in the same hiring redesign. The salary history ban shapes what you may ask, and the range rule shapes what you must tell. Combining the two into one pass through your application form and screening script is far less work than two separate projects.
The Wage Data Report
Section 105E requires private employers with 100 or more Massachusetts employees at any point in the prior calendar year, and that already file a federal EEO-1, to submit that report to the Secretary of the Commonwealth annually by February 1. The first filing was due February 1, 2025.
It is not a new data collection. You upload a copy of the EEO-1 you already filed federally, through an online portal, and the state publishes aggregate data drawn from those submissions. The second year filing was due February 2, 2026, because February 1 fell on a Sunday that year.
Most small businesses never reach 100 Massachusetts employees, so the posting duty is the part that matters. If you are approaching that headcount, put the February filing on the compliance calendar alongside your other annual obligations, since it arrives in the same window as federal year end filings.
Penalties and the Cure Window
Enforcement belongs exclusively to the Attorney General's Office, and the statute creates no private right of action. An applicant or employee who believes a posting was noncompliant complains to the state rather than filing suit, which changes the risk profile considerably compared with wage claims.
Penalties escalate by offense rather than by the number of postings involved, which rewards employers who fix the problem quickly and punishes those who ignore repeated notices.
| Offense | Penalty | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| First | Warning | No fine attaches to a first offense |
| Second | Up to $500 | Fine, at the discretion of the Attorney General’s Office |
| Third | Up to $1,000 | Fine, at the discretion of the Attorney General’s Office |
| Fourth and later | Up to $25,000 per violation | Moves into the general civil penalty provisions of chapter 149 |
The cure window is the provision worth knowing. For the first two years after the effective date, running through October 29, 2027, an employer that receives a notice to cure has two business days to correct the posting. Fix it inside that window and no penalty issues for that violation.
After October 29, 2027, the cure period ends and the escalating penalty schedule applies without that buffer. Employers treating the current period as a soft launch should use it to build the process rather than to postpone it.
Retaliation and Pay Conversations
The statute prohibits retaliation against an applicant or employee for exercising rights under it. That includes asking for a pay range, complaining to the employer or to the Attorney General's Office, and participating in a proceeding. The protected act is the request itself, not the outcome.
Managers need this framed as an ordinary question with an ordinary answer. The failure mode is not a dramatic reprisal. It is a manager who reads a range request as disloyalty and quietly adjusts how they think about that person at review time.
There is a second layer. The National Labor Relations Act has long protected most private sector employees who discuss wages with coworkers, so handbook language telling staff to keep pay confidential carried risk before Massachusetts acted. Publishing ranges makes such a policy look worse still. Removing it is a straightforward cleanup, and it pairs naturally with a broader look at pay equity across your team.
A Compliance Checklist
Compliance here is about five artifacts rather than five hundred decisions: a headcount calculation, a range document, a posting template, a manager script, and a record of what you disclosed. Build those once and the ongoing work is small.
If you want to formalize the internal side, our pay transparency policy templates include a Massachusetts version you can adapt. For the wider set of state obligations that apply to a Massachusetts payroll, the Massachusetts HR compliance guide lays them out in one place.
Where Employers Get Caught
The failures I see are procedural rather than defiant. Nobody sets out to hide a range. They lose track of a channel, or they never ran the headcount math, or the process lived in one person's head and that person left.
Assuming coverage from a headcount snapshot is the first one. A December headcount of 31 is not the test, and neither is a July peak of 40. Only the average across pay periods answers the question, and it can point the opposite way from either snapshot.
Forgetting the agency posting is the second. Employers fix the careers page in an afternoon and leave a search firm running a version of the same requisition without a range. The obligation does not transfer with the work.
Treating internal moves as exempt is the third. A promotion discussed in a one to one, with the number appearing only in the final letter, misses a disclosure the statute requires. Massachusetts is not alone in extending pay transparency to promotions and transfers, which is one reason multi state employers benefit from a single internal standard.
Publishing a range nobody believes is the fourth. A span of 145,000 dollars for one role invites exactly the scrutiny you were trying to avoid, and it damages your candidate experience regardless of what a regulator concludes. If you are hiring in the state, the wider Massachusetts hiring guide covers the registrations and notices that sit around this one.
Missing the notice to cure is the fifth, and the most avoidable. Two business days is a real deadline. Assign the inbox, assign the authority to edit a posting, and the window stops being a risk. State obligations cluster in Massachusetts, and employers already tracking the state WARN requirements usually have the monitoring habit in place already.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the Massachusetts pay transparency law apply to my company?
It applies if you averaged 25 or more employees whose primary place of work is in Massachusetts during the prior calendar year. Guidance from the Attorney General's Office says to count full time, part time, seasonal and temporary workers on the payroll in each pay period, add those counts, and divide by the number of pay periods. Remote employees whose primary place of work is Massachusetts count, and so do remote workers telecommuting to a Massachusetts worksite. A company headquartered elsewhere can still be covered.
When did the salary range posting requirement take effect?
The posting and disclosure duties in section 105F took effect on October 29, 2025. The statute itself, Chapter 141 of the Acts of 2024, was signed on July 31, 2024, and phased its obligations in over more than a year. The wage data reporting duty in section 105E started earlier, with the first reports due February 1, 2025. An employer that crosses 25 Massachusetts employees after the effective date does not receive a separate grace period.
What has to appear in a Massachusetts job posting?
The annual salary range or hourly wage range you reasonably and in good faith expect to pay for that specific position at the time of posting. Nothing more is mandatory. The text of section 105F does not require listing benefits, bonus targets or equity. Where the role pays through commissions, piece rates or tips, disclose the anticipated commission, piece rate or tip income so the figure means something to an applicant.
Do internal postings and recruiter postings need the range?
Yes. The requirement covers internal postings, external postings and postings placed on your behalf by a third party recruiter or staffing firm. Employers who corrected their own careers page and left an agency running the old advertisement have a live gap. The practical fix is to put the range in the requisition record itself, so every downstream posting is built from one source rather than reassembled per channel.
What are the penalties for a violation?
Enforcement sits exclusively with the Attorney General's Office, and there is no private right of action. A first offense draws a warning, a second up to 500 dollars, a third up to 1,000 dollars, and a fourth or later offense civil penalties reaching 25,000 dollars per violation. Through October 29, 2027, an employer receiving a notice to cure has two business days to correct the posting, and curing inside that window avoids the fine for that violation.
Which employers file the annual wage data report?
Private employers with 100 or more Massachusetts employees at any point in the prior calendar year that already file a federal EEO-1. They submit that report to the Secretary of the Commonwealth through an online portal by February 1 each year. You do not build a new report for the state. The filing due in the second year moved to February 2, 2026, because February 1 fell on a Sunday.
Can I still ask candidates about their salary history?
No. Massachusetts banned salary history questions through its Equal Pay Act well before the range rules arrived, so a Massachusetts employer must publish a range and refrain from asking an applicant for prior pay. Treat the two as one hiring change. Rewrite the application form, the screening script and the offer approval step in a single pass rather than running two separate compliance projects months apart.
Are employees protected when they ask about pay?
Yes. The statute prohibits retaliation against an applicant or employee for requesting a pay range, complaining to the employer or the Attorney General's Office, or participating in a proceeding. Separately, the National Labor Relations Act protects most private sector employees who discuss wages with coworkers, so a handbook rule requiring pay confidentiality was already a risk. Removing that language is a sensible companion change.
This guide is general information for employers, not legal advice. Verify current requirements against official Massachusetts sources and have your postings and policies reviewed by an employment attorney licensed in the Commonwealth before you rely on them.