Colorado Pay Transparency Law: The 2026 Employer Guide

Colorado Pay Transparency Law: The 2026 Employer Guide

Colorado wrote the first pay transparency law in the country, and it is still the strictest one you will deal with. Most states stop at "put a range in the ad." Colorado does not. It also requires you to tell every employee about every opening, announce who you picked afterward, and explain how people move up through a career progression. Miss any of those and the state can fine you between $500 and $10,000 per violation.

This is not theoretical. The Colorado Department of Labor and Employment has fielded 2,860 pay transparency complaints since the law took effect, and its citations have carried more than $841,000 in fines — including a single $552,000 citation against DaVita in January 2025. Here is what the law actually requires in 2026, where employers keep tripping, and what you need in place behind the posting.

TL;DR

• Colorado's Equal Pay for Equal Work Act (EPEWA, C.R.S. § 8-5-101 et seq.) covers any employer with at least one employee in Colorado — including out-of-state companies hiring remote workers.
• Every posting must include pay or a pay range, a general description of benefits and other compensation, and how and by when to apply.
• Since January 1, 2024, you must also notify all employees of job opportunities, post a post-selection notice within 30 days, and disclose career progression requirements.
• Fines run $500 to $10,000 per violation. CDLE has issued 24 citations and collected fines topping $841,500 to date.
• Ranges must be good faith. A defensible range comes from a job evaluation method you can show your work on — not from a number someone eyeballed.

What the law is, in plain terms

Colorado's Equal Pay for Equal Work Act has two halves, and CDLE treats them as separate enforcement tracks.

Part 1 — Unequal Pay. You must pay employees the same wage rate for substantially similar work regardless of sex. You cannot ask about salary history or rely on it to set pay. You cannot stop employees from discussing pay, and you cannot retaliate against anyone who does.

Part 2 — Pay Transparency. This is the part that generates the complaints. It requires you to disclose compensation in all job postings and notices, internal and public; announce job opportunities to all employees; disclose who was selected afterward; explain career progressions; and keep records of wages and job descriptions.

Part 2 took effect January 1, 2021 under SB 19-085. Governor Polis then signed SB 23-105, the Ensure Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, on June 5, 2023. Its amendments took effect January 1, 2024 and added the notice requirements that catch most employers off guard. That bill also extended the statute of limitations on wage discrimination claims from three years to six.

The operating rules live in the Posting, Screening, and Transparency (POST) Rules, 7 CCR 1103-18. CDLE's plain-English guidance is INFO #9A, last revised May 29, 2024.

Who is covered

Any employer — public or private, of any size — with at least one employee in Colorado. There is no 15-employee floor and no 30-employee floor like Minnesota's.

The remote work piece is where out-of-state employers get burned. If a job could be performed in Colorado, the posting rules apply, no matter where your headquarters sits. CDLE issued a specific compliance assistance letter on this point because so many companies tried the "this role is open to all states except Colorado" workaround. That carve-out is legally risky and, frankly, a recruiting own-goal.

What every posting must contain

Four things, every time:

1. The rate of pay or the pay range. A range must be the range you genuinely intend to pay for that job. You may not post a range you have no intention of honoring at either end.
1. A general description of benefits — health care, retirement, paid time off, and any tax-reportable benefits.
1. A general description of any other compensation — bonus, commission, equity, profit sharing.
1. How to apply and the application deadline. The deadline can be extended, but you have to state one.

CDLE has been explicit about range-stuffing. You cannot post a $60,000–$180,000 range across a junior and senior role you are hiring for separately just to cover yourself. You can post a wide range if the posting genuinely covers both levels and you might really pay the bottom for a junior hire or the top for a senior one. The test is whether the range reflects real intent.

The three requirements employers forget

Ranges get the headlines. These three cause the citations.

1. Notice of job opportunities

You must make reasonable efforts to announce every job opportunity to all employees who might be interested — on the same calendar day you post it externally, and before you make a selection decision. The notice has to include the job title, the pay or range, the benefits summary, and how to apply.

2. The post-selection notice

Within 30 calendar days of a selected candidate starting, you must tell the employees the new hire will regularly work with: the selected candidate's name, their former job title if they were internal, their new job title, and how employees can express interest in similar roles in the future. This one is new since 2024 and it is the requirement I see missed most often, because it lives with the hiring manager rather than with recruiting.

3. Career progression disclosure

If a role has a career progression — a regular or automatic promotion based on time in role or another objective metric an employee can satisfy without competing for it — you do not have to post each individual advancement. But you do have to disclose to all eligible employees what the requirements for that progression are, along with the pay and benefits at each step.

That last requirement quietly forces something bigger than a compliance memo. To disclose progression requirements honestly, you need levels that mean something, criteria that are written down, and pay attached to each step. Most organizations discover they have job titles but not a job architecture.

Penalties and how enforcement actually works

Fines run $500 to $10,000 per violation, and CDLE treats each non-compliant posting as its own violation — which is how a single mishandled requisition campaign turns into a six-figure number.

The enforcement pattern is worth understanding, because it is more forgiving than the maximums suggest. As of CDLE's July 7, 2026 data:

Read that cure rate again: 78.55% of employers who receive a voluntary compliance letter fix the problem, and the matter ends there. CDLE would rather you comply than pay. The employers who end up cited are generally the ones who ignored the letter or had a systemic problem across many postings — DaVita's $552,000 citation (settled down to $298,000), Lockheed Martin's $151,000, Twitter's $43,000, Lumenalta's $37,500 in June 2025.

The lesson is practical: a compliance letter is a gift. Treat it like a 30-day fuse, not a dispute to litigate.

Building a range you can actually defend

Here is the part the legal alerts skip. Colorado requires a good faith range. Good faith is not a legal formality — it is an evidentiary standard. If a candidate or the Division asks why the Senior Analyst range is $95,000–$125,000, "that's what we've been paying" is a weak answer. "We scored this job against weighted compensable factors, it landed at 412 points, and 412 points maps to Grade 7, whose range is benchmarked to the 50th percentile of our market" is a strong one.

That is what the point-factor method gives you: a documented, repeatable chain from job content to grade to range. Score each job against factors like skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions with sub-factors and explicit weights. Total points determine the grade. Grades carry ranges. Every number has a paper trail behind it.

The same trail does double duty under Part 1. If two employees performing substantially similar work are paid differently, EPEWA requires you to justify the gap on permitted grounds. Point scores let you demonstrate that the two jobs are not, in fact, substantially similar — or, if they are, tell you fast that you have a problem to fix before the state does.

Working on your Colorado ranges right now? See how PointFactors scores jobs and produces the documentation behind every grade.

A 60-day compliance plan

If you are behind, work in this order.

1. Audit live postings. Pull every open requisition, internal and external. Check all four required elements. Fix the gaps this week — postings are the easiest thing for a complainant to screenshot.
1. Fix the notice workflow. Build the internal announcement into your ATS so it fires the same day as the external post. Do not leave it to a manager's memory.
1. Add the post-selection notice to onboarding. Make it a required step at day one of the new hire's start, with a 30-day clock.
1. Write down your career progressions. For every role with automatic advancement, document the criteria, timing, pay, and benefits at each step. Distribute it.
1. Rebuild ranges on a defensible basis. Score jobs, set grades, benchmark ranges. This is the longest step and the one that pays off in every other state you operate in — see our multi-state compliance guide and our breakdown of what defensible pay ranges require.
1. Run a pay equity check. Before someone else does. Start with a pay equity audit.

FAQ

Does the Colorado law apply to my company if we have no office there? Yes, if you employ at least one person in Colorado, or if the job you are posting could be performed in Colorado. Remote postings are covered.

Can we exclude Colorado from a remote job posting to avoid the requirements? CDLE has addressed this directly and views it unfavorably. Excluding Colorado applicants from a role that could be done remotely does not reliably remove your obligations, and it costs you candidates.

How wide can a pay range be? As wide as your genuine intent supports. A range is defensible if you would actually pay the bottom to some qualified candidate and the top to another. It is not defensible if the ends exist purely to give you room to negotiate.

Do we have to post ranges for internal promotions? Yes. The disclosure requirements apply to internal notices and promotional opportunities, not just external ads.

What is a "career progression" exactly? A regular or automatic promotion based on time in role or another objective metric that an employee can satisfy without competing against other candidates. Those advancements do not each need a separate posting, but the requirements, pay, and benefits must be disclosed to eligible employees.

How long do we have to keep records? You must preserve records of job descriptions and wage rates for the duration of employment plus two years. The statute of limitations on wage discrimination claims is now six years, so a longer retention window is the safer practice.

What happens if we get a complaint? CDLE typically sends a voluntary compliance letter first. Nearly four out of five employers cure the issue at that stage and the matter closes without a fine. Respond quickly and fix the underlying process, not just the one posting.

Is Colorado stricter than other states? On the whole, yes. Most state laws cover posting disclosure only. Colorado adds job opportunity notices, post-selection announcements, and career progression disclosure — obligations that reach into how you run promotions, not just how you write ads.

The bigger picture

Colorado is a preview. The notice and progression requirements that feel unusual today are the same ideas showing up in the EU Pay Transparency Directive and in the next wave of state bills. Employers who build a real job structure now — scored jobs, defined grades, documented ranges — comply in Colorado almost as a byproduct, and they are ready when the next state moves.

The ones who patch each law individually will be doing this again in eighteen months.

Ready to build ranges that hold up in Colorado and everywhere else? Start a PointFactors job evaluation and get the documentation behind every grade you set.

Sources: Colorado Department of Labor and Employment — Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, CDLE INFO #9A: Transparency in Pay and Job Opportunities, Colorado General Assembly — Senate Bill 23-105

Justin Hampton is founder and CEO of PointFactors.