The state you live in now decides what your next job will pay

by Ric @ Jobric

Two engineers, same company, same job title, same level. One lives in Denver. One lives in Dallas.

The Denver engineer can see exactly what the role pays before applying. The Dallas engineer cannot.

That gap, the one between knowing and guessing, is now worth real money. A November 2025 NBER working paper by Arnold, Quach, and Taska — analyzing salary disclosure laws across multiple states — found consistent evidence of a 1.3% to 3.6% increase in wages, and that the wage boost reaches both new hires and existing workers who never directly negotiate. By the time you finish reading this article, you'll know whether you live in a state where the law works in your favor, what to do if you don't, and how to use this information to your advantage in your next negotiation.

The short version: by early 2026, approximately half of the US workforce, more than 60 million workers, work under some form of salary disclosure requirement. The map keeps growing. And if you live in the wrong state, you can often still use the right state's laws to your benefit.

These states have active pay transparency laws requiring some form of salary disclosure:

Three more on the docket:

The other 30 or so states still operate on the old system. Salary is a mystery until you're deep enough in the process to ask without seeming presumptuous.

Here is the part nobody tells you. If a role can be performed from a state with transparency laws, most jurisdictions consider the role covered, even if the employer is headquartered elsewhere.

Read that again. If you live in Texas but the job is remote, and the company would also hire someone from California or New York to do that same remote work, California and New York's disclosure rules typically apply to the posting.

This is why a startup based in Miami that hires remote-friendly will often disclose salary ranges in their LinkedIn postings even though Florida doesn't require it. They're not being generous. They're complying with the strictest jurisdiction their candidate pool covers, and treating every posting the same is easier than maintaining 17 different versions.

For you, the worker, this means: if you're applying to remote roles, you can usually find the salary range somewhere, even if your home state doesn't mandate it. Look at the same posting on the company's careers page versus their LinkedIn versus their Indeed listing. Compare the version they post for California-eligible roles to the one they post for Texas-eligible roles. If you see a range on one and not the other, you've already learned something.

A salary range isn't a price tag. It's a structure. Understanding the structure tells you where to negotiate from.

A well-constructed range typically spans 30 to 50%. So $95K to $115K (a 21% spread) is a tight, well-thought-out range. $80K to $160K (a 100% spread) is essentially a "we'll figure it out later" non-answer. Beware those.

Inside a real range:

The negotiation question isn't "can I get the top number." The question is "what's my honest position within this range, given my actual experience?" Once you know that, you ask for slightly above where you should land, leave room to compromise to where you should land, and stop.

The honest answer: ask anyway. The worst that happens is they decline to share. Many employers will share if asked, even in states where they're not required to. Many recruiters consider it good practice.

The script is short and works:

That's it. Ask it at the first call. Asking is not aggressive. It's professional. The recruiter's job is to make sure they're not wasting your time, and yours is to make sure you're not wasting theirs. A range, even a vague one, lets both of you decide whether to keep going.

If they refuse outright, that's information. Treat it like any other signal about how the company communicates.

A few moves that work even where the law doesn't help you:

A range of $60K to $180K isn't transparency. It's compliance theater. The company is technically posting a range while telling you nothing.

This is the same problem as a ghost listing. The posting exists, but it isn't communicating in good faith. Treat wide-range postings the way you'd treat any other low-signal listing: spend less time on the application, and ask the salary question early in the screening call to filter out the ones that won't bring you to a real number.

If you've read our ghost listings guide, you already know how to spot a posting that isn't serious. Wide salary ranges are one of the same signals expressed differently. They're often a sign the role isn't priced because it isn't real, or because the company is keeping its options open in ways that won't end well for whoever takes the job.

A few things to watch in the rest of 2026.

The EU Pay Transparency Directive (Directive (EU) 2023/970) requires member countries to transpose the law into national legislation by June 7, 2026. This is likely to increase pressure on global employers operating in both the US and Europe to unify their disclosure policies rather than maintaining separate standards by region. Watch for that — though implementation across member states has been uneven, with several countries already signaling they'll miss the deadline.

The federal Salary Transparency Act, introduced in Congress in 2023, would standardize disclosure across all US states. It hasn't moved meaningfully, but the growing patchwork of state laws creates political pressure for federal action. Don't bet on it passing in 2026, but it's not impossible.

More states are likely to follow. Pennsylvania, Texas, and Florida have legislation in committee. None are certain to advance this year. But the direction is clear: more disclosure, not less. The employers fighting it are losing the fight.

Salary transparency is one of the rare policy stories where workers genuinely come out ahead. Not by a lot per person, but by a lot in aggregate. A 1.3% to 3.6% wage bump, compounded across the roughly 60-million-worker covered population, is billions of dollars per year shifted from employer coffers to worker paychecks. That's real.

If you live in a covered state, use the law. Read the ranges. Triangulate. Negotiate from a position of knowledge instead of one of hope.

If you don't, do three things. Ask anyway. Triangulate using the data sources above. And remember that remote roles are usually covered by someone's state law, so you can almost always find the range if you look.

The job market works for you now. Not yet evenly. But more than it used to.

That's the update. Now go do something that isn't job searching.

Ric @ Jobric