Massachusetts Poised to Enact Pay Transparency Law

Author: Emily Scace, Brightmine Senior Legal Editor

July 25, 2024

The Massachusetts legislature has passed a bill that would require employers to include pay information in job postings. The bill now goes to Gov. Maura Healey, who has until August 3 to sign or veto it.

H. 4890 would require employers with 25 or more employees in Massachusetts to include a pay range in any advertisement or job posting intended to recruit applicants for a specific role. Both employers' direct recruiting efforts and those done indirectly through recruiters and other third parties would be covered.

Employers would also be required to share a pay range upon request with an employee for their current role and with an applicant for an open role. Upon being offered a promotion or transfer to a new position with different job responsibilities, employees would be entitled to learn the pay range for the new role.

The bill does not contain a private right of action; instead, the state attorney general would have the power to enforce the law. Violations would be punished by a warning for the first offense, a fine up to $500 for the second offense, and a fine up to $1,000 for the third offense. One or more job postings made by the same employer within a 48-hour period would be considered a single offense.

H. 4980 would take effect 90 days after signature, with the pay transparency requirements kicking in one year later. Therefore, affected employers are likely to face a compliance deadline in late October or early November 2025.

Twelve other states and the District of Columbia have enacted similar pay transparency laws.

In addition to the pay transparency provisions, under H. 4890, the Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth would collect workforce demographic data that employers are already required to submit to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Employers subject to federal EEO-1, EEO-3, EEO-4 or EEO-5 reporting requirements would be required to file that same information - and "any successor report containing the same or substantially similar work demographic and pay data" - with the state each year.

Although the EEO-1 and other federally required data reports do not currently contain information on employee compensation, that may soon change. The EEOC announced in the Spring 2024 Unified Agenda, published earlier this month, that it plans to propose a rule regarding pay data collection in January 2025.