State of Pay Transparency 2026: We Scanned 917 Job Postings

Methodology

In June 2026, we used PayTransparency’s automated scanner to audit the public career pages of 127 US tech companies. For each company, we scanned up to 20 active job postings against the pay transparency requirements of every US state that has an active posting law, plus New York City and Remote-US postings.

Companies in the dataset use one of three ATS platforms: Greenhouse (57 companies), Ashby (45 companies), or Lever (4 companies, plus a small number on other platforms). All companies are US-based tech or software firms. The dataset skews toward venture-backed startups and growth-stage companies.

A posting was counted as non-compliant if it was missing a required salary range or benefits description in any jurisdiction that applied to that role. Contractor postings and non-US roles were excluded. A total of 917 active postings were checked across 127 companies.

Key findings

Finding 1: Non-compliance is near-universal

93.7% of companies in our dataset had at least one non-compliant job posting. Only seven companies had a fully clean scan across all postings checked: Datadog, Alma, Pie Insurance, Insurify, Jumio, Storyblok, and Yotpo.

This is not a fringe compliance issue. At a 73% individual posting violation rate, the average company in this dataset is out of compliance on nearly three out of every four job postings it publishes.

Finding 2: Your ATS platform predicts your compliance rate

The most striking finding in the data is not by company or state — it is by ATS platform.

Every single company in our dataset using Ashby had a 100% violation rate. Not one Ashby customer had a compliant posting. The pattern held across all 45 Ashby companies checked, including some of the most sophisticated HR teams in the industry.

The reason appears to be structural. Ashby’s job creation workflow does not prompt recruiters or hiring managers to enter compensation ranges or benefits information before publishing. The field simply is not there, so the data never makes it into the posting. Lever, by contrast, includes a compensation field in its posting creation flow, which likely explains its significantly lower violation rate.

Greenhouse sits in the middle — 57% violation rate — because compensation fields exist but are optional and not prominently surfaced in the default workflow.

The implication is significant: a company’s legal exposure is partly determined by a product decision made by the vendor it chose for recruiting infrastructure, not just by its own compliance efforts.

Finding 3: California and New York drive most violations

Breaking violations down by the state law triggered shows California and New York accounting for the majority of individual violations.

Remote-US postings are notable because they trigger multiple state laws simultaneously. A single “Remote-US” posting with no salary range is a potential violation in every covered state at once — California, New York, Colorado, Washington, Illinois, and more. See our guide to remote job posting pay transparency for more detail.

Finding 4: The financial exposure is substantial

We estimated fine exposure across all 671 non-compliant postings using each state’s published penalty schedule. The aggregate maximum exposure across the 127 companies reaches $44.9 million. Individual company exposure varies widely depending on the number of open roles, which states are triggered, and how many postings affect high-penalty jurisdictions like New York City (up to $250,000 per violation) and Massachusetts (up to $25,000).

Even at median penalty levels — ignoring NYC outliers — a company with 20 open roles that trigger California, Colorado, and Illinois can face over $400,000 in theoretical exposure.

Why this is happening

The data suggests this is primarily an operational and tooling gap, not a knowledge gap. The companies in our dataset are well-resourced tech firms with dedicated HR teams. They know pay transparency laws exist. The problem is that their posting workflows — largely determined by their ATS vendor — do not enforce or surface compliance requirements at the moment a posting is created.

Pay transparency compliance has become an ongoing operational requirement, not a one-time legal update. New state laws came into effect in January 2025 (Illinois, Minnesota) and more are scheduled for 2026 (Maine, Virginia). Companies that updated their posting templates in 2022 or 2023 are now out of date.

Limitations

This analysis reflects a sample of tech companies using Greenhouse, Lever, and Ashby ATS platforms as of June 2026. It is not a comprehensive audit of any individual company. The dataset skews toward US-based, venture-backed software companies and is not representative of all industries or employer sizes. Findings should not be treated as legal advice.