A few years ago, pay transparency was a conversation topic. Now it's a posting requirement. A growing list of states and cities require employers to publish salary ranges in job postings, disclose ranges to candidates or current employees on request, or report pay data to a state agency. If you hire across state lines, even a little, there's a decent chance at least one of these laws already applies to you. And more are coming.
For a lot of HR and payroll leaders, the uncomfortable part isn't the posting itself. It's what the posting exposes. Publishing a range means you have to have a range, one you can defend, and one that matches what you actually pay the people already doing the job. Plenty of companies open that drawer and find pay decisions made one hire at a time, job titles that mean different things in different departments, and compensation data scattered across spreadsheets that don't agree with the payroll system.
If that's you, take a breath. This is fixable, and the system you already run on, ADP Workforce Now, can carry most of the load once the underlying data is in shape. Here's how to get from "we'd rather not look" to "post the range, we're ready."
Pay transparency laws vary a lot by jurisdiction, and they change often, so we'll stay at the general level: some laws require salary ranges in every job posting, some require disclosure to applicants at a certain stage, some give current employees the right to ask for the range of their own role, and some add pay data reporting to the state. Remote jobs complicate things further, because a posting that can be filled from a covered state may be covered too.
Two practical takeaways. First, don't build your compliance approach around the one state where you're headquartered. Build it around everywhere you employ people and everywhere you post jobs. Second, verify the current rules with employment counsel before you publish or report anything. This article will help you get your data ready; the specific requirements, thresholds, and effective dates are counsel's to confirm.
The direction of travel is clear even if the details differ.
Every transparency requirement, whatever its flavor, assumes you can answer three questions quickly: what is this job, what do we intend to pay for it, and what do we actually pay the people in it? Companies with clean comp data answer in minutes. Companies without it spend weeks reconstructing answers.
Here's the trap in slow motion. A recruiter needs to post a role in a covered state and asks for the range. Nobody has one, so someone makes one up based on the last hire. The posting goes live at $70,000 to $90,000. Then a current employee doing the same job at $62,000 sees the posting. Now you have a retention problem, a morale problem, and possibly a legal question, all created by one improvised number.
Transparency doesn't create pay problems. It reveals them, in public, on your careers page. The fix is to do the revealing privately first: get your jobs defined, your ranges set, and your incumbents mapped before any of it becomes a posting. That work lives or dies on data quality.
Open your job and position data in ADP Workforce Now and look at it the way a stranger would. Can you tell what people do from their job titles? Or do you have "Analyst II," "Sr. Analyst," "Analyst, Senior," and "Business Analyst 2" all describing the same work? Title sprawl is the most common problem we see, and it makes range-setting impossible, because you can't attach a pay range to a job you can't define.
The cleanup sequence looks like this. First, inventory every active job title and count the incumbents in each. Second, consolidate duplicates and near-duplicates into a single set of jobs with consistent naming. Third, organize those jobs into levels or grades, so "Senior Analyst" means the same scope and pay band whether the person sits in finance or operations. Fourth, rebuild that structure in ADP Workforce Now using its job and compensation fields, so the system, not a spreadsheet, is the source of truth.
While you're in there, check the fields that transparency work depends on: work location, remote status, FLSA classification, department, and pay type. A pay range means little if you can't reliably slice your population by the jurisdiction rules that apply to them. This is unglamorous work, and it's the foundation for everything else.
Once jobs are defined, each one needs a range, a minimum and maximum you'd actually pay, not a number reverse-engineered from whoever you hired last. Good ranges come from a blend of market data for comparable roles, your internal structure, and honest reflection about what the job is worth to your business.
A few principles from the ranges we've helped clients build. Make them wide enough to be real but narrow enough to mean something. A posting that says $50,000 to $150,000 satisfies nobody. Set ranges by job and geography where pay genuinely differs, and document why. Most important, compare every incumbent to the range for their job before anything gets published. People below minimum need a plan, whether that's an adjustment, a regrade, or a documented reason. People above maximum need an explanation you'd be comfortable giving out loud.
Store the ranges in your compensation structure in ADP Workforce Now rather than in someone's personal spreadsheet. When ranges live in the system, recruiters pull the same number every time, reporting reflects reality, and the next merit cycle starts from structure instead of improvisation.
Transparency laws effectively invite every employee to compare their pay to the posted range, so it's smart to run the comparison yourself first. A basic internal pay equity review isn't a statistical dissertation. It starts with a straightforward question: within each job, do pay differences line up with factors we can articulate, like experience, tenure, performance, or location?
Pull compensation data by job from ADP Workforce Now and look at the spread within each role. Flag outliers on both ends and write down the reason for each. "She's paid 15 percent more because she has eight years of specialized experience and leads the team" is a fine answer. "Nobody remembers" is not, and finding a "nobody remembers" now, while you can fix it quietly and fairly, beats finding it after an employee raises their hand.
Two cautions. Do this work under the guidance of counsel, who can advise on how to structure and protect the review. And treat the underlying data with care: individual pay records are sensitive, so keep the analysis to the small group that needs it. If the initial look raises questions, a deeper statistical analysis is worth scoping.
With structure and ranges in place, the last mile is making compliance routine instead of heroic. For postings, that means a simple workflow: every requisition pulls its range from the compensation structure, someone confirms the jurisdictions the posting touches, and the range appears in the posting formats those rules require. If you use ADP's recruiting tools, build the range into the requisition process so postings can't go out without one.
For reporting, some jurisdictions require periodic pay data submissions, and those pull demographic, job, and compensation data together. The same clean structure that powers your postings powers these reports. Test now by running the reports you'd need and checking whether the output makes sense, because a reporting deadline is a bad time to discover that half your workforce is missing an EEO category or a work location.
Finally, put a name next to the obligation. Someone on your team should own "transparency compliance" the way someone owns quarterly tax filings: tracking which jurisdictions apply, watching for new ones, and keeping the posting workflow honest. Laws in this space change quickly, and owned obligations get met.
A client with about 250 employees, hiring remotely across a dozen states, came to us after their recruiting team flagged that several open roles were covered by posting requirements they weren't meeting. Their comp data was where many companies' data is: 300-plus job titles for 250 people, no documented ranges, and pay set offer by offer for years.
We ran the project in three phases over about ten weeks. Phase one was structure: we consolidated those titles down to roughly 60 real jobs in five levels and rebuilt the job architecture in ADP Workforce Now. Phase two was ranges: working with market data the client licensed, we built a range for each job, then mapped all 250 incumbents against them. About 20 people sat below their new range minimum; the client budgeted adjustments over two merit cycles, roughly $180,000 in total, with the largest gaps fixed first. A handful sat above maximum, each with a documented reason. Phase three was workflow: ranges were loaded into the system, the requisition process was updated so no posting could publish without one, and counsel reviewed the jurisdiction checklist.
The visible result was compliant postings. The bigger result was that comp conversations changed. Managers stopped negotiating from thin air, employees got straight answers about where they sat in their range, and the next merit cycle took half the time because the structure did the arguing.
You can, but think twice. Candidates compare postings, and employees talk across state lines. Companies that post ranges in one state and hide them elsewhere tend to get the scrutiny of transparency with none of the trust benefits. Many of our clients decide that one consistent, defensible approach everywhere is easier to operate than a patchwork, but that's a business call to make deliberately, with counsel's input on the minimums.
That's normal, and it's the point of doing this before you're forced to. Expect a small group below minimum and a few above maximum. Build a funded, prioritized plan to fix the gaps over a cycle or two, and document the rationale for legitimate outliers. What you shouldn't do is bend the range to fit the outliers; that defeats the purpose and rarely survives a second look.
For a mid-market company starting from scattered data, plan on two to four months for structure, ranges, and workflow, depending on how much title cleanup you need and how fast decisions get made. The calendar driver is usually not the system work, it's leadership alignment on ranges. Start before a deadline forces the pace.
Companies that handle transparency well share a few habits. Their job architecture is maintained, not archived, so new roles get slotted into the structure instead of spawning new titles. Ranges are reviewed on a calendar, once a year for most, against fresh market data. Every posting pulls its range from the system automatically. Incumbent-to-range comparisons run before each merit cycle, so drift gets corrected in the normal course of business. And someone owns the legal watch, with counsel on speed dial as new jurisdictions come online.
Get there and transparency stops being a threat. It becomes a recruiting advantage, because candidates trust posted ranges, and a management tool, because structure makes every comp decision faster.
If your comp data isn't ready for daylight, we can get it there. Ignite HCM is staffed by former ADP service professionals, and we work with ADP exclusively, so we know exactly how to build job architecture, load ranges, and wire up postings inside the platform you already own. No tickets, no hold queues. You get a dedicated consultant who has done this cleanup before and knows where it hides.
Could you publish your pay ranges tomorrow without wincing? REQUEST A CONSULTATION.
ADP and the ADP logo are registered trademarks of ADP, Inc. Pay transparency laws vary by state and city and change frequently; this article is general guidance, not legal advice. Confirm current requirements with your employment counsel.
