Employers in five more states will be required to include salary ranges in their job postings as new pay transparency laws take effect in 2025, starting with Illinois and Minnesota on Jan. 1.

The laws, also going into effect later in the year in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Vermont, largely mirror the pay disclosure requirements that have spread across a half dozen more blue states including California and New York. Colorado first imposed a mandate applying to job ads in 2021.

The measures are aimed at shrinking the wage gap faced by women and workers of color by giving them more upfront information during their job search, interview, and salary negotiations. The gap for women working full-time widened in 2023 for the first time in two decades. Women’s average earnings fell to 82.7% of men’s earnings from 84% a year earlier, according to Census Bureau data showing higher income growth for men than for women.

The new laws’ requirements vary particularly in how they apply to ads for remote jobs that can be performed outside the states where the employer has its offices or other physical locations. The new Illinois measure , similar to the New York state law , requires a pay range in postings for jobs that will be performed at least partially in the state or performed outside the state but with the employee reporting to an in-state office or supervisor.

Some are less clear on this point. The New Jersey law will require any employer with 10 or more employees to include a pay range in ads for “new jobs and transfer opportunities,” without specifying where the jobs are based. The Massachusetts and Minnesota laws also are vague on the job’s location, while Vermont’s law uses language similar to Illinois covering out-of-state jobs that report to in-state offices or work sites.

The variations and uncertainties add pressure for large, multi-state employers to select the most stringent of all the state requirements and apply it universally, meaning that some might opt to include a pay range and benefits information in all job ads nationwide, said Mark Girouard, an employment attorney with Nilan Johnson in Minnesota.

Businesses are “trying to find a national standard that will meet all of these state requirements, at least for employers that have a significant national presence,” he said. “That’s the direction I see things headed.”

The learning curve for complying with new transparency laws is likely to be steepest for smaller and mid-size companies without a broad national footprint, said Margo Wolf O’Donnell, the Chicago-based co-chair of the labor and employment practice at Benesch, Friedlander, Coplan & Aronoff, LLP.

For larger “multi-state-type organizations, they have already been including this information” to comply with existing state laws, O’Donnell said.

Following the Jan. 1 effective dates in Illinois and Minnesota, employers in New Jersey will be required to include pay ranges in their job ads starting June 1, in Vermont on July 1, and in Massachusetts on Oct. 29. Illinois and New Jersey also will require employers to include a general description of benefits such as health insurance coverage in job ads.

Promotions, Data Reporting

Beyond requiring salary ranges in job ads, the new laws also will seek to promote pay equity in other ways.

Illinois and New Jersey employers will have to give reasonable notice of promotion opportunities to their employees, similar to a provision Colorado lawmakers added in 2023.

The new Massachusetts law aims to require large employers to report pay data by race and gender to the state, mirroring reporting requirements already in effect in California and Illinois. These measures aim to increase accountability for employers by letting regulators monitor for pay inequities.

But the data reporting part of the Massachusetts law is pegged to employers having to report the same data to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. That federal reporting mandate—once thought likely to be revived after the EEOC returned to a Democratic panel majority in 2023—faces a murky outlook as Donald Trump retakes the White House.

Massachusetts lawmakers could opt to revise the measure next year to apply that data reporting mandate regardless of any federal requirement, said Vasu Reddy, director of state policy for workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center.

“It’s entirely possible that they’ll be able to do that, but that might delay it,” she said. As the law is currently written, employers were supposed to submit their first pay data reports to Massachusetts by Feb. 1, 2025.

The spread of salary range disclosure laws has helped increase pay transparency nationwide, but with the bulk of the increase concentrated in states where lawmakers have mandated it, Reddy said, citing 2023 research by the NWLC and Glassdoor.

Job listing website Indeed reports slow but steady growth in the frequency of job ads including salary ranges. The company said 57.8% of ads on its site included pay information in September, up from 52.2% a year earlier.

The future is also unclear for another federal effort to boost pay transparency. The Biden administration proposed a rule early in 2024 that would require federal contractors to include pay ranges in job postings, but it has not yet been finalized as Biden’s presidency draws to a close.