Defensible Pay Ranges: What Virginia and Maine Just Changed

Defensible Pay Ranges: What Virginia and Maine Just Changed

On July 1, 2026, Virginia became the latest state to require a salary range in every job posting. Twenty-eight days from now, on July 29, Maine joins it. If you hire in either state, you are already past the point where "we'll add a range later" is a plan. But here is the part most compliance checklists skip: posting a number is the easy 20% of the work. The hard 80% starts the moment a current employee reads the range you posted for their own job and asks why they sit below it. That question is now a legal and cultural exposure, not just an awkward one. This piece is about the shift from disclosing a range to defending one—why 2026 made it urgent, and how to build ranges that hold up when someone pushes.

TL;DR

• Virginia's pay transparency law took effect July 1, 2026; Maine's takes effect July 29, 2026. Both require a good-faith pay range in job postings.
• That brings the count to roughly 16 states plus D.C. with pay transparency laws on the books.
• Enforcement is no longer theoretical: Virginia allows civil penalties up to $1,000 for a first violation and $5,000 for each one after; Maine funded a new Department of Labor inspector to police it.
• The real risk isn't the posting—it's the internal comparison it invites. A public range exposes every unexplained gap between people doing similar work.
• A range is defensible when it rests on a consistent job evaluation method, not on legacy salaries or negotiation history.
• Point-factor job evaluation gives you the paper trail: this job scores here on these factors, so it sits in this band.

What actually changed this month

Virginia's law—identical Senate and House bills signed in spring 2026—requires every public and internal posting for a job, promotion, or transfer to include the wage, salary, or a wage or salary range. It also bans asking for salary history. The statute defines the range as a good-faith minimum and maximum set by reference to a real anchor: an applicable pay scale, a prior range for the role, the actual pay of people already in equivalent jobs, or the budgeted amount. Get it wrong and the Attorney General can seek up to $1,000 for a first violation and up to $5,000 for each subsequent one, though a posting corrected within 15 business days is shielded from suit (Epstein Becker Green summarizes the Virginia rule here).

Maine's law, effective July 29, covers employers with 10 or more employees. It requires the "prospective range of pay the employer will offer to a successful applicant" in postings, obligates you to disclose the range for a role on a current employee's request, and adds a record-keeping duty: keep each employee's position and pay history for the length of employment plus three years. Maine paired the mandate with money for a new labor inspector, which tells you how seriously the state intends to enforce it (Littler's analysis of the Maine law walks through the details, and Ogletree covers both new July 2026 laws together).

Neither law is an outlier. They land on top of an established stack—California, Colorado, Illinois, New York, Washington, Massachusetts, and more—that already made salary ranges the norm rather than the exception. If you want the full state-by-state picture, our 2026 multi-state compliance guide tracks who requires what. The headline for this article is narrower: the legal question has quietly moved from "did you post a range?" to "can you justify it?"

Why the number is the easy part

Posting a range is a formatting problem. You can solve it in an afternoon with a template and a wide enough band. The trouble is that a wide, unjustified band is exactly what regulators and employees are learning to spot.

California closed that loophole first. As of January 1, 2026, a "pay scale" there must be a good-faith estimate of what you reasonably expect to pay on hire—not a $60,000-to-$180,000 range engineered to reveal nothing. Virginia and Maine both use "good faith" language too. So the escape hatch of posting an absurdly broad range is closing, and a tight, honest range forces a question you may not have answered: how did we decide this job is worth $95,000 to $115,000 and not something else?

If the honest answer is "that's roughly what the last person made" or "that's what the candidate negotiated," you have a defensibility problem. Legacy salaries carry forward every bias and every one-off exception that has ever entered your pay data. The moment you publish a range built on that history, you invite a current employee—or a plaintiff's attorney—to line up two similar jobs, notice the gap, and ask you to explain it. Under the EU Pay Transparency Directive this same logic is already codified in Europe; U.S. state law is arriving at the destination by a different road.

The internal comparison you just invited

Here is the scenario that catches employers off guard. You post a range for a Senior Analyst role: $98,000–$118,000. A current Senior Analyst making $91,000 sees it. Nothing about your posting is illegal. But you have just handed that employee a documented reason to ask why they sit below the floor of a range you set in good faith for their own title.

Multiply that by every role you post and you can see the real exposure. Transparency doesn't create pay gaps—it reveals the ones you already have. That is why a pay equity audit is now table stakes before, not after, you go transparent: you want to find and fix unexplained gaps on your own terms, not discover them through a complaint. But an audit tells you where the gaps are. It doesn't, by itself, give you a repeatable way to prevent new ones. For that you need a consistent method for deciding what a job is worth in the first place.

What makes a range defensible

A defensible range has three properties. It is anchored to the content of the job, not the history of the person. It is produced by a method you apply the same way to every role. And it leaves a record you can show a regulator, an employee, or a judge.

Point-factor job evaluation is built to deliver all three. It scores each job against weighted compensable factors—skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions, broken into sub-factors—and totals the points. Jobs with similar totals land in the same salary band, regardless of who holds them or what they negotiated. When someone asks why the Senior Analyst range is what it is, your answer stops being "market says so, trust us" and becomes "this role scored 620 points on responsibility, autonomy, and technical depth, which places it in Band 6, whose range is $98,000–$118,000." That is a sentence you can defend.

Crucially, point-factor evaluation also gives you internal consistency—the thing legacy-salary ranges can never provide. Two jobs of genuinely equal value get genuinely equal ranges, because the same factors were scored the same way. That is precisely the standard "good faith" is quietly pointing toward.

Before you post another range, ask one question: if a current employee in that job challenged the number, what would you show them? If the answer is a spreadsheet of past salaries, you have a compliance gap. See how PointFactors builds a defensible range from the job up.

A practical sequence for the second half of 2026

You don't need to boil the ocean. If you hire in Virginia, Maine, or any of the other transparency states, work in this order.

First, inventory where you post and where your candidates could live—remote roles filled by someone in a covered state pull you into that state's rules. Second, run a pay equity audit to surface unexplained gaps before you publish ranges that expose them. Third, replace legacy-salary logic with a consistent evaluation method so new ranges are anchored to job content. Fourth, document the method, because both Maine's record-keeping duty and every "good faith" standard reward a clear paper trail. Do these in sequence and the posting requirement becomes the last, easy step—not the trigger for a scramble.

Frequently asked questions

Which states have pay transparency laws in 2026?

As of mid-2026, roughly 16 states plus Washington, D.C. require some form of pay disclosure. Virginia's posting requirement took effect July 1, 2026, and Maine's takes effect July 29, 2026. Requirements vary—some mandate ranges in every posting, others only on request—so multi-state employers should confirm the rule for each jurisdiction where a role could be based.

What is a "good faith" pay range?

It is a range you genuinely expect to pay for the role, anchored to a real reference point such as a pay scale, the actual pay of people in equivalent jobs, or the budgeted amount. California, Virginia, and Maine all use this framing to close the loophole of posting an implausibly wide band that discloses nothing meaningful.

Do pay transparency laws apply to remote jobs?

Often, yes. If a remote role could reasonably be filled by someone living in a state with disclosure requirements, that state's rules can apply even if your company is headquartered elsewhere. Treat any broadly advertised remote posting as if the strictest applicable state law governs it.

Does posting a salary range create legal risk?

The posting itself is the compliant act. The risk is second-order: a public range invites current employees to compare their pay to the range set for their own job. If you can't explain the gaps with a consistent method, you have exposure. That's why many employers run a pay equity audit and adopt a formal job evaluation method before going transparent.

How does job evaluation make a pay range defensible?

Job evaluation scores a role against consistent, weighted factors and places it in a band based on those points rather than on the incumbent's salary history. That gives you a documented, repeatable reason for every range—the kind of record that stands up when a regulator or employee asks how you set the number.

What penalties do Virginia and Maine impose?

Virginia allows the Attorney General to seek civil penalties of up to $1,000 for a first violation and up to $5,000 for each subsequent violation, with a 15-business-day window to cure a defective posting. Maine's fines run lower per violation but the state funded a dedicated Department of Labor inspector to enforce the law, signaling active oversight.

Post the range. Then be ready to defend it.

Virginia and Maine didn't just add two more rows to the compliance spreadsheet. They pushed every employer one step closer to a world where the salary range is public and the reasoning behind it has to be sound. You can meet the letter of these laws with a template. You can only meet their spirit—and protect yourself from the internal challenges transparency invites—with ranges anchored to how much each job is actually worth. Book a PointFactors demo and see how point-factor job evaluation turns every posted range into one you can defend, line by line.

Justin Hampton is the founder and CEO of PointFactors, an AI-powered point-factor job evaluation platform that helps HR and compensation teams build defensible, internally consistent pay structures.