Do Remote Job Postings Need a Salary Range? Which State Law Applies

Yes, in most cases. A remote job posting is generally covered by pay transparency law wherever the work could be performed, not where your office sits, so a role open to candidates across the United States usually picks up the strictest rule among the states you would genuinely hire from. Thirteen states plus Washington, D.C. require the range in the advertisement itself, and several of them also want a benefits line next to it. The practical answer for a national remote role is to publish one compliant version everywhere rather than trying to serve different postings to different states.

Last updated August 2026. This is a practical summary of published employer guidance, not legal advice. Two states changed their rules this summer, so confirm the position for the states you hire in before you post.

Do remote job postings need a salary range?

For most US employers hiring remotely, yes. The obligation does not attach to your headquarters. It attaches to the role, and specifically to where that role will be performed or where it reports. A fully remote posting that says "remote, US" is by definition open to candidates in Colorado, New York, Washington, California and every other state with a posting rule, which is why the honest answer for a national remote req is that you are almost certainly covered by something.

The states that require the number in the advertisement as of August 2026 are California, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Virginia and Washington, plus Washington, D.C. Connecticut, Nevada and Rhode Island require the range too, but hand it over on request or after an interview rather than publishing it. The full picture, including the employer size that triggers each rule, is on our guide to pay transparency laws by state.

Two of those are new enough that most of the lists circulating online are wrong. Virginia's SB 215 took effect on July 1, 2026 and Maine's HB54 on July 29, 2026. If you copied a compliance checklist in the spring, it does not have either.

Which state's pay transparency law applies to a remote job?

Usually every state you would actually hire from, which is why the question is less useful than it sounds. The statutes take a few different approaches. Colorado, Washington, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Vermont and D.C. reach work performed in the state, including remote work. New York and Illinois reach roles that report to a supervisor or office located there, which catches a remote worker anywhere in the country if their manager sits in Manhattan or Chicago. Maryland covers a role that will be physically performed at least in part in Maryland. California and New Jersey cover certain remote roles.

Virginia is the interesting exception. Its 2026 statute does not say whether it reaches roles that could merely be performed in the Commonwealth, and the employment bar has flagged that as genuinely unresolved rather than settled in either direction. Where a rule is ambiguous and the cost of compliance is one line of text, comply.

Stack those tests against a single "remote, US" posting and the overlap is total. You do not need to work out which one governs. You need to satisfy the strictest one, because a candidate in any covered state can read the same ad.

What if the role is open to candidates in every state?

Then write to the toughest standard and stop thinking about it. In practice that means Colorado, which wants the pay range, other compensation, a general description of benefits and the date the application window closes. A posting that satisfies Colorado satisfies essentially everything else in the country, and it takes about three extra lines.

Some employers try the other route: exclude the strict states. It was a visible tactic in 2021 and it has aged badly. Excluding Colorado from a remote role in a market where roughly 53.6% of US postings already publish a band signals something about the employer that most candidates read correctly, and it shrinks your pool in exactly the states with the deepest marketing talent. It also does not help with Maine, Maryland, Virginia and the rest arriving behind it.

Do pay transparency laws apply if my company has no office in that state?

Generally yes, and this is the assumption that catches out small remote first companies most often. Maryland and Virginia have no headcount threshold at all. Colorado bites at a single employee in the state. New York starts at four. If you are a twelve person company with everyone working from home in eight states, you are not outside these rules, you are inside several of them at once.

Hiring the person is a separate matter from posting the role, and it comes with its own state by state obligations: registering for payroll and unemployment insurance where the new hire lives, and following that state's sick leave rules. We cover the cost side of that, including why a W-2 remote employee runs about 1.25 to 1.4 times base once payroll taxes and benefits are counted, on the page about what it takes to hire remote marketers.

What has to go in a remote job posting besides the range?

More than most employers realize, and this is where a good faith band still fails an audit. Seven jurisdictions want something published alongside the number:

• Colorado: pay range, other compensation, a general description of benefits, and the application closing date.
• Illinois: pay scale and a general description of benefits, plus internal notice of promotion opportunities within 14 days.
• Maryland: wage range, a general description of benefits, and any other compensation.
• Minnesota: starting salary range or fixed rate plus benefits, and no open ended ranges, so "$90,000 and up" does not qualify.
• New Jersey: pay range, benefits and other compensation.
• New York: compensation range, plus the job description if one exists.
• Washington and D.C.: range or fixed wage plus specified benefits disclosures.

Maine adds a wrinkle worth knowing if you hire commission based marketers: a role paid solely on commission has to say so explicitly rather than carry a dollar range. And Maine, Nevada, Virginia and Illinois all reach internal postings in some form, so the note you send your own team about an open role needs the same band as the public ad.

How wide can the range be on a remote role?

The same discipline applies as anywhere else, with one extra pressure. A remote candidate has no city to infer pay from, so the band is doing more work than it would on an on site role. Roughly 15% to 25% around the midpoint covers a single seat. Wider than that and you have technically disclosed while practically disclosing nothing, which weakens the good faith position that every one of these statutes turns on, and which Harvard Business Review reported in February 2026 can actively deter women from applying.

Employers sometimes ask whether they can post a national range wide enough to cover geographic pay differences. You can, but say that is what you are doing. "$95,000 to $135,000 depending on location tier, with the top of the band for the highest cost metros" is defensible, informative, and takes one line. An unexplained $40,000 spread is neither.

How to write one remote posting that complies everywhere

Four things, and then reuse the template:

1. Publish a good faith range tied to something real: your pay scale, last year's range for the role, what comparable people earn, or the approved budget. If you are unsure where to anchor it, the published averages for nineteen US marketing roles on our 2026 marketing salary guide are the evidence you would want if anyone asked how you set it.
2. Add a benefits line, even where your states do not require one. It costs a sentence and it clears Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey and Washington in one move.
3. State the geography and the overlap. "Remote, US" plus the time zone overlap you need, in hours, rather than the word flexible.
4. Say when applications close, which Colorado requires and which quietly improves your response rate everywhere else.

Then think about where the posting is seen. A remote marketing role competes with every other fully remote listing a candidate can reach in an afternoon, and candidates increasingly start from a feed of remote jobs updated daily rather than from any one company's careers page. Publishing the band is what gets your listing shortlisted in that context, because it is the only field most candidates can filter on before they read a word of the description.

What happens if you get it wrong?

Penalties across the country run from about $100 to $250,000 per violation depending on the jurisdiction and whether the conduct repeats. Virginia allows civil penalties of up to $1,000 for a first violation and up to $5,000 for each one after, along with a private suit within a year of the breach. California extended its recovery window to six years from January 1, 2026, which is a long time to be defending a number you set in an afternoon.

The cure provisions are worth knowing because they are unusually generous right now. Virginia gives you 15 business days to correct a non compliant posting across every location it was published, and if you do, no suit can be brought for that violation. Washington has run a five business day cure period for first violations, and that grace expires on July 27, 2027. Neither helps with a pattern, only with a mistake.

Frequently asked questions

Do pay transparency laws apply to contractors? Mostly no. These statutes generally attach to employment postings rather than to engagements with independent contractors. That is not a workaround, though: whether someone is a contractor turns on control over their hours, tools and other clients, not on what the contract or the job ad calls them.

Does the rule apply to internal remote roles and promotions? In several states, yes. Maine, Nevada, Virginia and Illinois all reach internal postings, transfers or promotion notices in some form. If you publish a compliant external ad and then circulate an internal note about the same job with no band, you have a problem in those states.

Can I post the range only to candidates in states that require it? Technically some employers geo target postings this way. It is fragile, since a single national listing on an aggregator undoes it, and it produces the odd result of publishing pay to some candidates and not others for the same job. One compliant version is simpler and cheaper to maintain.

Will publishing the band get me more applicants or fewer? Usually better ones rather than more. US postings averaged about 95 applicants each in 2025, up from roughly 46 in 2021, so the constraint is no longer volume. Around 44% of candidates say they are unlikely to apply without a range, and the ones you lose by publishing it are largely the ones who would have withdrawn at the offer stage. If your listings are drawing volume but nothing usable, the diagnosis is usually elsewhere, and we walk through it in why a job posting is not getting applicants.

The short version

Assume your remote posting is covered, because it almost certainly is. Write it to the Colorado standard, which means a defensible range, a benefits line, other compensation and a closing date, and you have cleared every rule in the country with one template you can reuse for the next req. The compliance work is genuinely about three lines of text. The harder part is the number itself, and that is a compensation question rather than a legal one.