2026 Study · First annual edition
Nearly 1 in 5 large-employer job postings fails state pay-transparency law
We collected 200 recent job postings from 20 large U.S. employers and graded each one against the pay-transparency posting requirements of the state it was hiring in. Of the 76 postings that could be determinately graded, 13 failed at least one requirement — a 17.1% fail rate. The most common miss: the pay range itself.
Seven of the 20 employers had at least one failing posting. This isn't a few bad actors — it's an industry-wide compliance gap.
Key findings
1. 17.1% of gradable postings fail.
Of the 76 postings hiring in states with in-force pay-transparency posting requirements, 13 were missing at least one required element — a pay range, benefits information, or an application deadline. That's roughly 1 in 6.
2. The pay range is the most-missed requirement.
Nine of the 13 failures (69%) were missing the pay range itself — the central disclosure these laws were written to require. Application deadlines accounted for 3 failures (all in Colorado), and benefits information for 1.
3. California postings fail at the highest rate.
Among states with at least 10 postings in the sample: California 23.5% (4 of 17), Washington 14.3% (2 of 14), New York 6.7% (1 of 15).
4. The problem is broad, not concentrated.
Seven of the 20 employers — more than a third — had at least one failing posting. The spread within the sample is wide: one employer disclosed pay on all 6 of its gradable postings, while another did so on only 3 of 10. The failures span industries, which suggests inconsistent posting processes rather than deliberate non-compliance.
5. 124 postings couldn't be graded — and we didn't count them as passes.
More than half the sample was excluded from grading: postings listed as remote with no state, postings in states with no applicable posting requirement, or postings whose location couldn't be mapped to a jurisdiction. Excluded postings are reported here — they are not treated as compliant.
State breakdown
| State | Postings in sample | Fail rate |
|---|---|---|
| California | 17 | 23.5% |
| Washington | 14 | 14.3% |
| New York | 15 | 6.7% |
Only states with at least 10 postings are shown as rates. States with fewer postings are reported as raw counts in the full dataset, never as percentages — small samples don't generalize.
What's driving the differences? California's posting law is among the oldest and broadest, and its postings make up the largest share of the gradable sample. But the more useful read is the requirement pattern, not the state ranking: across all three states, the missing pay range dominates. Employers aren't tripping on obscure rules — they're skipping the headline disclosure.
What independent research finds
We are not the first to find this gap. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, using Lightcast postings data, found that roughly a quarter of job listings covered by pay-transparency laws fail to include salary information as of January 2025 — a higher non-compliance rate than ours. (Audoly & Xing, October 2025) A vendor index from Beqom (May 2025) lands in the same place, at about a quarter of postings in mandatory jurisdictions lacking salary information. And a New York City Council review (January 2025) found that 13 of 100 employers reviewed had at least one posting gap.
A note on comparability: the Fed counts salary-info omission only, among all employers; we count any missing requirement (pay, benefits, deadline) among large employers only. The measures differ, but they point the same way — and ours is the lower number.
What this means for employers
Your posting process has a gap, not a conspiracy. The pattern — missing pay ranges across a third of large employers, spanning industries — looks like inconsistent process, not deliberate defiance. Postings get drafted by hiring managers, edited by recruiters, and posted by coordinators. If pay-range disclosure isn't a hard gate in that chain, it falls off. It did, in 1 of 6 cases.
The risk is compounding. Pay-transparency posting requirements now cover 15 U.S. jurisdictions, and more states are adding them. Every new jurisdiction is another rule your posting workflow has to satisfy. The employers failing today are the ones whose process hasn't been rebuilt for a multi-state compliance reality. And the consequences are no longer theoretical: more than 250 Washington employers have faced class actions over deficient postings since that state's law took effect — including a $1.1–$1.65M settlement (alleged violations, not an adjudicated finding) — and New York City can fine up to $125,000 per uncured violation.
The fix is cheap. A deterministic pre-posting check — pay range present, benefits described, deadline stated — takes seconds per posting and catches exactly the failures this study found. We built one: it's free, it runs in your browser, no signup.
Non-compliant postings don't just risk fines — they lose candidates. Two separate 2026 surveys (Monster, iHire) find six in ten job seekers won't apply to — or are less likely to apply to — a posting without a salary range. A missing pay range is a smaller applicant pool before it is ever a legal problem.
Grade your postings in bulk → Check a single posting →
Methodology
The sample. 200 job postings from 20 large employers (1,000+ employees each, mixed across tech, healthcare, retail, finance, hospitality, and logistics). For each employer: the 10 most recently posted roles on their public career page as of the collection date, excluding internships, contractor/gig roles, and internal-only transfers. The employer list was written down and fixed before any posting was collected — no substitutions after seeing results.
Collection window. All 200 postings were collected on October 14, 2026, and graded the same day against the requirement dataset as in force on that date. Postings and laws both change; these results describe that snapshot.
The grader. Each posting was graded with a deterministic heuristic scan against our verified pay-transparency requirement dataset — the same engine behind our public bulk audit tool. It checks for the presence of a pay range, benefits description, and application deadline wherever each is required. Deterministic means reproducible: anyone re-running the same postings gets the same results. No AI involved, no judgment calls.
What counts as a fail. A posting fails if any required element is missing for its jurisdiction. A posting passes only if all applicable requirements are detected.
Exclusion criteria. A posting was excluded from grading — never counted as a pass or a fail — if it could not be mapped to a covered jurisdiction: remote postings with no state listed, postings in states with no applicable posting requirement, or postings whose location was ambiguous. 124 of 200 postings were excluded on these grounds. We report this number because it's part of the story: the 17.1% fail rate describes the 76 determinately gradable postings, not the full sample.
Anonymization. Employers are not named. The grader is a heuristic screen, not a legal determination, and naming an employer as “non-compliant” on that basis would overclaim what the data supports. The aggregate story is the finding.
Honest limits
- This is a sample of 200 postings from 20 large employers — not a census of U.S. job postings. It describes the sample, nothing more.
- The grader is a fast heuristic scan: pattern matching for pay figures, benefits language, and deadlines. It can miss things and misread things. It is not legal advice and not a legal determination of compliance.
- “Checked, never certified”: a passing grade doesn't mean a posting is legally compliant, and a failing grade doesn't mean the employer broke the law.
- State assignment follows the location listed on the posting — an approximation, especially for remote and multi-state roles.
- Postings and laws both change. These are results for the collection window stated above.
This restraint is deliberate. A study that overclaims gets one news cycle and zero repeat citations; a study that's honest about its limits gets cited every year.
Press
For press inquiries, the anonymized dataset, or a quote: jobdescriptiontool@gmail.com
“This isn't employers defying the law. It's posting processes that were never rebuilt for a multi-state compliance reality — and the fix is a check that takes seconds.”— Ryan Stanford, founder, jobdescriptiontool.com
jobdescriptiontool.com is a free toolkit for compliant hiring: a pay-transparency checker covering 15 U.S. jurisdictions, an AI job description generator, posting audits, and offer tools. Every state requirement in its dataset is sourced from official labor-department publications.