Minnesota lawmakers want to require salary ranges in job postings

When Minnesota Rep. Kristin Bahner left a previous job years ago, a male co-worker told her to make sure she was paid what she was worth at her next position.

Bahner would come to learn that her male colleague made about $20,000 more per year than she did, despite her five years of experience compared to his one. She managed three teams to his one, she said.

“It was a wake-up call for me,” Bahner said. “We know that the gender pay gap is real. We know that it gets wider with age and experience.”

Now a DFL lawmaker from Maple Grove, Bahner is pushing legislation aimed at improving pay equity. Under her bill, companies with 30 or more employees would be required to disclose salary ranges in job postings. All postings would be required to list the minimum and maximum annual salary or hourly range of compensation, as well as a description of all benefits and other compensation.

The kind of pay gaps Bahner experienced, she said, quickly add up over the course of a career for workers who are more likely to be caring for children, parents and their spouse, she said. If the position had listed a salary range when she applied, Bahner said, she thinks she would have been paid more fairly.

Legislators see the bill as complementary to a law passed last year that barred employers from asking candidates for their salary history. That law went into effect on Jan. 1.

“When transparency is available it puts folks on a more level playing field where they are able to have those conversations with a potential employer,” Bahner said. “It sets expectations if you know what the bottom of the range is versus the top, and you can ask critical questions.”

Though Minnesota has one of the highest rates of women participating in the workforce, the state is ranked 20th in gender wage gaps — with 31 states having smaller gaps. Over a lifetime, the average woman in Minnesota loses $447,960 in wages attributable to the gap, according to a report by the Center on Women, Gender and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

For full-time workers in Minnesota, women earn 82 cents for every dollar that men make. For women of color, that number drops further: to 72 cents for Asian American women, 64 cents for Native American women and 57 cents for Latina women, according to a 2024 Women’s Foundation of Minnesota report on the Status of Women and Girls in Minnesota.

Other states including New York, California and Colorado have passed similar salary pay transparency laws in recent years.

The reception to the Minnesota bill has been favorable from members of both parties, said Sen. Alice Mann, DFL-Edina, one of three senators signed onto the bill in the state Senate.

“Data shows that it’s very easy to comply with. It’s not a burden on businesses to do. Not only is it helpful for the employee, it’s also very helpful for the employer. They get better-qualified job applicants, they get more job applicants. There’s more trust between the two parties when this happens,” Mann said.

Once there are gender pay gaps in a company’s salary structure, it is more difficult to address them and they perpetuate themselves over time, said Christina Ewig, faculty director of the Center on Women, Gender and Public Policy at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

If a man and a woman, or a white employee and a black employee, come into a company with radically different salaries, percentage-based raises over time will only widen that gap, she said.

New employment mandates that could make the hiring process more complicated are concerning to small business owners at a time when many are struggling to fill open positions, John Reynolds, Minnesota state director for the National Federation of Independent Businesses, said in an e-mail. However, they appreciate that the smallest business owners will be exempt, Reynolds said.

Applicants in some states with similar laws have noted that some companies list wide ranges in an effort to circumvent the law, with some job postings including ranges spanning more than $100,000.

“That’s not helpful for prospective employees,” Ewig said. “When the ranges are really wide, prospective employees have less trust in the organization that they’re applying for.”

Legislators behind the Minnesota bill plan to add a good-faith provision to discourage that, Bahner said.

Though enforcement won’t be included in the first iteration of the bill, they hope to give employers time to get used to the new cultural change in job applications, Mann said. But with a tight labor market in Minnesota outpacing the rest of the U.S., both Mann and Bahner expect salary ranges to be a useful recruitment tool.

“I think we’re at a place where if you want to attract top talent, you want to attract the best-qualified candidates, transparency is something that those candidates want,” Bahner said. “It’s something that they are demanding.”