Do pay transparency laws help women get paid fairly?

A growing patchwork of state laws now requires employers to post salary ranges, disclose pay on request, and/or stop asking job candidates about their salary history. Many states have only recently begun implementing the laws, and data capturing their impact thus far has just started to emerge.

For women, so far, research on the impact of the laws is mixed, but leans encouraging: wage-gap reductions in the low single digits to double digits show up across multiple studies, and salary history bans appear to give women changing jobs a meaningful pay bump.

However, critics counter that transparency can compress pay scales for men and women, discourage negotiation, and add administrative overhead for employers. Some evidence backs that up, too. The answer may be that these laws help, but they’re not a silver bullet.

Why It Matters

Women working full-time still earn less than men on average: 2026 Bureau of Labor Statistics put women’s median weekly earnings at 80.6% of men’s in the first quarter of 2026.

Pay range transparency empowers job applicants and current employees with pay information to aid in their job search, inform their employment decisions, and better manage pay negotiations with employers.

The specific requirements of these laws can vary depending on the jurisdiction, but they generally aim to promote fairness and reduce pay disparities based on factors like gender, race, and ethnicity.

That pay gap for women tends to widen over a career as small early disadvantages compound with every job change and promotion. A lot of that compounding happens quietly: a recruiter asks what you made at your last job, and that number, and not your skills or the market rate, becomes the anchor for your next offer.

Pay transparency and salary history bans were both designed to break that cycle, one by exposing what a job is actually worth, the other by cutting off the question that lets old inequities follow workers from employer to employer.

Background

No federal law requires pay transparency, so this is entirely a state-by-state (and sometimes city-by-city) patchwork of laws. Colorado kicked things off in 2021 with the first law requiring salary ranges in job postings.

Roughly 17 to 18 states, plus Washington, D.C., now have some form of statewide pay transparency law on the books. Some states mandate ranges in every job ad, others only require disclosure upon request or before an offer is made.

Salary history bans are a related but distinct tool, and it’s worth being precise about that: the two policies are enacted and enforced independently, not as a package deal. A state can have one without the other. Right now, 22 states have state-wide salary history bans.

Many states that adopted transparency laws also folded in a salary history ban — Maryland, Virginia, and California are frequently cited as states that clearly enforce both, and Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Maine layer the two together as well.

What Research Shows

Pay Transparency
Since Colorado was the first state with a pay transparency law, there’s been more time to collect data on the impact on women’s salaries. According to the National Women’s Law Center, women in Colorado earned about 80 cents for every dollar paid to similarly qualified men when the law passed in 2021, a gap that had narrowed to roughly 85 cents by 2024.

A 2025 study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Southern California found that Colorado’s law bolstered competition in the labor market and lifted wages by as much as 3.6%.

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) has found that 66% of organizations that list pay ranges on job postings say that doing so has increased the quality of applicants they’re seeing. And 65% of organizations that list pay ranges on job postings say that doing so makes them more competitive in attracting top talent.

On the not-so-positive side of findings, a national study published in Econometrica found that transparency policies weakened worker’s individual bargaining power, because employers often avoided raising any one worker’s pay to sidestep costly renegotiations with everyone else.

Salary History Bans
Salary history bans have a more consistent positive track record for women, and for job switchers specifically.

Boston University School of Law researchers tracking hiring data found that after states banned salary history questions, women who changed jobs earned roughly 8% more in starting pay than comparable women hired where no ban existed, with similarly sized gains for Black workers.

A related analysis using job-posting data found the same pattern of employers posting wages more often and raising pay for job changers, particularly women and non-white workers, once a ban took effect. The theory is straightforward: when an employer can’t anchor an offer to what you made before, they’re forced to price the job on its own merits.

However, one study also found that without salary history information, some employers assume the worst about unknown candidates and offer more cautious starting pay — a dynamic that partly offsets the gains for job changers.

As more states' pay transparency and salary history bans take effect, statistics on their impact on women in the workforce should become more available. Right now, how they’re working is a live policy debate with real dollars attached for millions of women.