So You Need to Figure Out Maryland Pay Scale Compliance
Most workers in the state don't realize how much has changed when it comes to salary disclosure requirements. If you're a new manager trying to post your first job opening under the updated rules, or if you're an employee trying to understand what range you should expect, this is the practical breakdown. I handled this for a mid-size firm last year when we had to rework every posting we ran through our systems. It was messy at first. The core rule is straightforward: any employer with at least 15 employees operating in Maryland must include a good faith salary range in every job posting. This applies whether the posting is on your own website, LinkedIn, Indeed, or any other platform. The law took effect in 2023 with specific penalties for non-compliance. Fines can hit up to $10,000 per violation, and there's also a private right of action that lets employees sue for actual damages, back pay, and attorney fees. Here's what people get wrong immediately. The salary range doesn't have to be exact. "Good faith estimate" is the legal standard, which means your posted range just needs to reflect what you would actually pay someone if you hired them tomorrow for that role. I learned this the hard way. We had a job posting for a senior analyst position where we listed $70,000 to $95,000. A candidate came in at $98,000 from their current employer and called us out because it didn't match what we eventually offered after negotiation. The range was legally compliant but the expectation gap was real. We ended up paying the higher end plus a signing adjustment just to make it work. That's the practical reality you need to plan for.
How the ranges are calculated matters more than most people realize. You need to look at what you currently pay people in similar roles, not what the market rate might suggest from a third-party report. The DOL reviews actual payroll data during complaints. If you've been consistently paying a role at $60K and suddenly post a range starting at $45K, that's not a good faith estimate. It looks like you're trying to lowball everyone applying.
What the Law Actually Requires Step by Step
First, determine your employee count. If you have 15 or more employees working in Maryland, the requirement kicks in. Part-time and temporary employees count toward that total. I've seen small businesses miss this because they only counted full-time staff on paper, but the statute doesn't make that distinction. Second, every single job posting needs the range. Not just senior roles. Not just new openings. If a current employee is posting internally for a transfer, that posting needs a range too. We had an HR person skip it for two lateral moves last year and nearly got slapped with a complaint. She had been relying on an old company policy that said internal postings were exempt. It isn't. There's no internal posting exemption in the statute. Third, the format. The range just needs to be included in the posting. It doesn't have to be in a specific font size or location, but it does need to be visible. If you bury it in a PDF appendix, that's probably not sufficient. Put it in the main body of the posting.
Get the Full Details
The deadline for compliance is already here. The law took effect in October 2023 for most provisions. If your company hasn't audited its postings, you're already exposed.
Edge Cases That Catch People Off Guard
Commission-only positions are one of the trickier ones. If the role is purely commission with no base salary, you still need to provide a good faith estimate of total compensation. That means estimating what a reasonable person could earn based on historical data, not guessing randomly. We struggled with this for our sales team. The problem was that two years of commission data had been skewed by the pandemic, so our usual ranges were misleading. We ended up using the three years before COVID as the baseline and noted that in our compensation documentation. The DOL asked for that documentation when a complaint came in, and having that paper trail saved us from any real penalty. Remote workers are another area. If someone works remotely but is stationed in Maryland, your Maryland obligations apply regardless of where the company headquarters is. Conversely, if you're a Maryland-based company hiring someone entirely out of state, that person's state rules govern their posting, not Maryland's. We had a hiring manager post a role for someone in Texas without a salary range, assuming Maryland didn't cover it. The employee then filed a complaint anyway because she was recruiting through a Maryland department and the job was functionally tied to the state office. That case got dismissed on jurisdictional grounds, but it was a waste of three weeks and a lot of stress. Document your reasoning. Job titles that don't match the actual duties can also be a problem. I've seen postings where the title was "Coordinator" but the responsibilities and range clearly described a mid-level specialist role. Candidates will notice this. It undermines credibility even when it's not technically illegal.
What Workers Should Do With This Information
If you're applying for a job in Maryland, you now have the right to see a salary range before you even apply. Use it. If a posting doesn't include one, you can file a complaint with the Maryland Department of Labor. The process is online and relatively simple. You don't need a lawyer to file initially. When you get an offer, compare it to the posted range. If it's significantly below the bottom of the range, you have grounds to negotiate harder or question whether the employer was acting in good faith. If it's above the posted range, that's fine legally but worth noting for future reference. Some employers post narrow ranges and then pay well outside them, which is legal but sometimes raises questions during audits. If your employer hasn't complied, talk to your manager or HR first before going to the state. Most companies just need a reminder and a process update. I've worked through this with about a dozen organizations and the vast majority fix the issue once they understand it. A few needed a complete overhaul of their ATS settings to make salary fields mandatory before a posting can go live.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
Updating old postings is one. Companies that have job boards running for months or years with legacy postings from before the law passed are sitting on a pile of non-compliant listings. Go through them. Archive or update any that are still active. This took our team about four hours using a search filter for "salary range" across our entire board, and we found roughly 30 stale postings that needed fixing. Another pitfall is posting different ranges for the same role depending on the platform. If you list one range on LinkedIn and a different one on your careers page for the exact same job, that's a red flag. It suggests you're manipulating the numbers to suit each audience. Keep it consistent. Use the same range everywhere unless you have a documented, legitimate reason for a difference, such as location-based pay adjustments. A third one is failing to update ranges when compensation changes. If you give yourself a merit increase cycle and most people in a given role moved up, your old posted range might now be below what you actually pay. You should be reviewing and updating posted ranges at least annually or whenever there's a significant shift in your pay structure.
Bottom Line
The Maryland pay scale transparency law isn't complicated in theory. It falls apart in practice because most companies never thought about it before. Audit your postings now. Make sure your ATS enforces the salary field. Train your hiring managers that internal and external postings both need ranges. And keep documentation of how you calculated every range you post. That last part is what separates a company that gets through an audit smoothly from one that doesn't.
