New legislation in Virginia and Maine is shifting the balance of power in salary negotiations firmly toward job seekers and employees.
The two states are the latest to require employers to disclose salary ranges in job postings, bringing the nationwide total to 18 states and Washington, D.C.
Virginia’s law took effect on July 1, with Maine’s law following shortly after on July 29, marking a continued expansion of pay transparency across the country.
For job seekers, the legislative shift means entering salary negotiations with concrete data rather than blind assumptions about what a role actually pays.
Salary-transparency laws do more than inform candidates; they “help narrow pay gaps and reduce wage discrimination” among historically marginalized demographic groups, according to Keith Spencer, a career expert at ResumeNow.
Jan Hendrik von Ahlen, managing director and employment expert at JobLeads, agrees that the laws fundamentally change how negotiations begin for candidates entering the process.
“It helps candidates because this inevitably changes the starting point of the negotiation,” von Ahlen noted, pointing to the concrete advantage of knowing a posted range before any conversation begins.
Without a stated range, job seekers often guess blindly, risking lowballing themselves by thousands of dollars or pricing themselves out of a role entirely due to unrealistic expectations.
HR experts universally agree that workers should negotiate their starting pay whenever possible, and transparency laws now give them a stronger foundation from which to do so.
Not all posted ranges, however, are created equal, and workers should watch carefully for suspiciously wide bands that offer little real guidance on actual compensation expectations.
“A very wide range is simply not a salary range at all, but the employer refusing to comply and publish the actual salary band as the law now states,” von Ahlen said, calling out a common tactic used to skirt the spirit of the rules.
Some companies post wide ranges to cast the broadest possible applicant net, benchmarking the real internal range only after reviewing who actually applies for the position.
If a posted range appears unusually broad, job seekers should use it as an opening to ask interviewers directly what distinguishes candidates at the lower end from those at the higher end.
When a budget is firmly capped at the top of a posted range, candidates should pivot to negotiating other valuable components such as signing bonuses, additional paid time off, flexible hours, or remote-work stipends.
A 2026 survey from Eastern Washington University found that 78% of professionals who used AI to prepare for salary negotiations reported feeling more confident heading into those conversations.
The same survey found that 48% of respondents specifically used AI for role-playing negotiation scenarios, though experts caution that AI can occasionally produce inaccurate salary data that should always be independently verified.
Current employees stand to benefit from transparency laws just as much as job seekers, particularly those who have remained with one employer long enough to fall behind prevailing market wages.
Workers who find that new hires at their company are being paid more for similar roles can use publicly posted salary data as direct evidence when requesting a raise from their employer.
Because most laws only require employers to list a base salary range, that still leaves room to negotiate additional compensation such as 401(k) matching, health benefits, performance bonuses, and equity awards.
Alongside salary research, employees should maintain a running record of their accomplishments at work to build a compelling, data-backed case for the compensation increase they are seeking.
