Virginia’s Pay Transparency Law Is Here: What Employers Need to Do Now

Virginia’s new pay transparency law took effect on July 1, 2026, and applies to employers with one or more employees in Virginia. If you employ people in Virginia or recruit for Virginia roles, the requirements below apply to you, and the compliance work is worth starting now rather than after a candidate or the Attorney General raises it.

Who the law covers

The law applies to any employer with one or more employees in Virginia. There is no headcount threshold, so coverage does not turn on company size. A ten-person employer and a ten-thousand-person employer have the same obligations.

That matters most for employers headquartered elsewhere. If you are based in North Carolina or South Carolina and you post a single remote or hybrid role that a Virginia employee could fill, that posting needs a range. Employers running payroll and HR across multiple states now have one more jurisdiction-specific posting rule to track, and Catapult supports employers with a Virginia footprint directly.

Job posting requirements

Beginning July 1, 2026, covered employers must include compensation information in all new job postings for positions covered by the law. Compensation may be stated as a wage, a salary, or a wage or salary range.

Which postings are covered

The law reaches both external and internal employment opportunities. Public (external) postings include:

• Job advertisements on your careers page
• Job boards such as Indeed or LinkedIn
• Recruitment emails
• Printed advertisements
• Other job announcements available to external candidates

Internal postings include:

• Promotions
• Transfers
• Other employment opportunities communicated to current employees, such as intranet postings, internal emails, and internal job boards

All such postings must include a good-faith wage or salary range. The internal piece is the one employers most often miss, because promotion and transfer announcements rarely run through the same review process as an external req.

What counts as a good-faith wage or salary range

A good-faith wage or salary range is the compensation range that the employer genuinely expects to pay for the position at the time the job is posted. The range should be reasonably narrow and supported by legitimate compensation information, rather than arbitrarily broad. A posting that reads “$45,000 to $180,000” is not a range, and it is the kind of posting that draws a complaint.

Virginia guidance indicates that a good-faith range may be based on:

• The organization’s existing pay grade or salary structure
• A range previously established for the position
• Compensation paid to employees in comparable roles
• The amount budgeted for the position

Notice what all four have in common: they assume you already have documented ranges. If you do not, market data is the fastest way to build defensible ones. Catapult’s regional and national wage surveys give you a credible foundation for every posted range, and a formal career level and pay band structure is what keeps the answer consistent from one posting to the next.

Virginia’s salary history ban

Employers are prohibited from:

• Asking applicants to provide their current or prior compensation
• Requesting salary history from a former employer
• Obtaining pay history through a third-party source
• Relying on prior compensation when making hiring or compensation decisions

An exception exists if an applicant voluntarily discloses compensation history without prompting. In that case, the information may be considered only to support a higher compensation offer, and only to the extent consistent with applicable equal pay requirements. If you already handle EEO-1 pay data reporting, the same pay records support both obligations.

The law also prohibits retaliation. Employers cannot refuse to interview, hire, or promote someone, or otherwise retaliate against them, because they declined to share their pay history or asked what a position pays.

Suggested compliance steps

The following is not legal advice, but it covers the practical steps that typically support compliance.

Job postings

• Update all Virginia-related job postings created on or after July 1, 2026, to include a good-faith wage or salary range.
• Ensure that postings prepared by third-party platforms or vendors for Virginia-based or Virginia-reporting roles also include the appropriate range.

Internal opportunities

• Update internal postings for promotions, transfers, and other opportunities accessible to Virginia employees to include a good-faith range.

Applications and systems

• Review employment applications and remove any questions requesting current or prior compensation, including those embedded in your applicant tracking system.
• Confirm that any background check or screening vendors are not collecting salary history on your behalf.

Interviewing and recruiting processes

• Update interview guides and recruiter instructions to prohibit salary history inquiries.
• Provide clear scripts or FAQs addressing how to respond when candidates ask how their offer will be determined, pointing to internal ranges, skills, experience, and market data rather than prior pay.

Third-party recruiters and staffing partners

• Notify external recruiters and staffing agencies of Virginia’s requirements. If recruiting runs through a partner, confirm that your recruitment process outsourcing agreement puts the posting obligation in writing.
• Include language in engagement letters or service agreements requiring compliance with Virginia pay transparency and salary history rules.

Training and documentation

• Train hiring managers, HR staff, and recruiters on when wage ranges must be disclosed, how to determine and document a good-faith range, and which salary history questions and practices are prohibited.
• Maintain documentation supporting the posted ranges, such as pay structures, market data, and budget approvals.

That last bullet is the one that decides how a dispute goes. A range you can trace back to survey data and a documented pay structure is defensible. A range someone picked in a hurry is not. Catapult’s compensation consulting team and benchmarking studies build the structure and the paper trail together, and compensation planning keeps ranges current year over year. For leadership roles, see executive compensation planning for 2027.

Penalties and enforcement at a glance

The statute and related guidance indicate that, in many cases, employers get an opportunity to correct a job posting that is missing required pay information after receiving written notice. Do not count on the cure window as a strategy, though. The salary history and retaliation provisions have no similar fix-it period, and the Attorney General’s penalty authority is not conditioned on it.

Frequently asked questions