How salary transparency laws — and remote work — forced a 5× increase in pay disclosure on tech job postings.
In January 2020, if you wanted to know what a job paid, you had to ask. Or guess. Or get the offer and discover you'd been lowballed. Only 6.7% of tech job postings on Hacker News's monthly "Who is Hiring?" threads included any salary information — a number so low it suggests deliberate omission rather than oversight.
By March 2026, that number stands at 29.4%. Nearly one in three postings now leads with a number.
That's a 5× increase in six years. And it didn't happen because the industry suddenly developed a conscience. It happened because legislatures started mandating it — and because remote work made it impossible to pretend those laws applied only to one city or one state.
The Baseline: 2020–2021
Before the first major salary transparency law took effect, the norms around pay disclosure in tech were clear and consistent: say nothing. The reasoning was mercenary but rational. Without published ranges, employers held all the cards. They could anchor offers low for candidates who seemed less negotiating-savvy, calibrate to market without committing to it, and avoid the internal politics that come when employees start comparing notes.
HN's "Who is Hiring?" threads skew toward startups and growth-stage companies — exactly the employers with the least incentive to lock in salary expectations early. In 2020, just 5.5% of postings included pay information. That crept to 6.5% in 2021, a modest uptick.
Colorado was the first state to force the issue. The Colorado Equal Pay for Equal Work Act (C.R.S. § 8-5-101), effective January 1, 2021, required employers to include compensation ranges in all job postings for roles that could be performed in Colorado — which, in a remote-first world, meant essentially any remote role. Some companies responded by explicitly excluding Colorado applicants. The workaround was crude but telling: companies knew they could publish ranges, they just preferred not to.
The HN data reflects this resistance. 2021 saw only a modest 1-point gain in pay disclosure. The law's impact was real but limited — too many companies were still geo-fencing their way out of compliance.
The Inflection Point: November 2022
The moment everything changed can be pinpointed with unusual precision: November 1, 2022.
That's when New York City's salary transparency law (Local Law 32 of 2022) took effect, requiring employers to include salary ranges in job postings for positions that could be performed in New York City. Unlike Colorado, NYC was impossible to route around. It's the largest tech labor market in the country outside Silicon Valley. You couldn't just add "except NYC" to your remote posting and pretend the problem went away.
The HN data shows the spike immediately. In November 2022, pay disclosure hit 14.1% — the first time it had broken 14%, up from 11.6% the month before. That's a 2.5-point jump in a single month. The market moved visibly the day the law went live.
Notably, 2022 averaged 10.4% overall — nearly double 2020's baseline. The trend was already accelerating through the year as companies began preemptively updating practices ahead of the November deadline. May 2022: 10.4%. August: 11.2%. October: 11.6%. The law's passage in January 2022 (with a November effective date) gave companies ten months to comply, and many did so gradually.
The Step Change: January 2023
If November 2022 was the inflection point, January 2023 was the step change.
On January 1, 2023, two more major laws took effect simultaneously:
- California SB 1162 (California Labor Code § 432.3) — required employers with 15+ employees to include pay scales in all job postings. California, home to Silicon Valley and more tech companies than anywhere else on earth.
- Washington State HB 1293 (RCW 49.58.110) — similar requirements for employers with 15+ employees posting Washington-accessible or remote roles.
In January 2023, pay disclosure jumped to 15.8% — the first month it had ever sustained above 15%. More importantly, it stayed there. The new floor had been set.
The Remote Multiplier
This is the dynamic that makes salary transparency laws more powerful than they appear on paper: remote work dissolved geographic compliance boundaries.
A salary transparency law nominally applies to roles in a specific jurisdiction. But "remote, USA" is not a jurisdiction. When a company posts a remote software engineering role, any qualified candidate in California, New York, Washington, Colorado, or Illinois can apply. That means the posting must comply with the most stringent applicable law — or the company accepts legal risk.
Most companies chose compliance. And once you've updated your ATS templates to include ranges, you include ranges on every posting. The marginal cost of adding a range to a New Hampshire applicant's version of the posting is zero. The cost of maintaining separate versions by state is high. So companies standardized on disclosure.
This is the remote multiplier: laws passed in states covering perhaps 30% of the population effectively governed 100% of remote job postings. HN's audience is overwhelmingly remote-friendly — in 2022, 87% of postings mentioned remote work at peak. That amplified the compliance effect beyond what any state legislature could have anticipated.
Acceleration: 2024–2026
By 2024, disclosure was no longer a legal checkbox — it was becoming a competitive expectation. Candidates filtered for postings with salary ranges. Companies that hid compensation started losing applicants to those that didn't. In a tighter hiring market, withholding salary information started to look like a self-inflicted wound.
Illinois added its own accelerant: the Illinois Equal Pay Act amendment (820 ILCS 112), effective January 1, 2025. Another major tech market locked in.
September 2023 crossed 20% for the first time (20.3%). November 2024 hit 23.1%. December 2025 reached 27.2%. March 2026: 29.4%. The trend line shows no ceiling in sight.
What This Means
The obvious winner is job seekers — particularly those earlier in their careers who lack the network and negotiating experience to extract salary information informally. When ranges are published, the information asymmetry that employers relied on for decades collapses. You know the floor. You know the ceiling. You know whether it's worth your time to apply.
But disclosure doesn't automatically mean fairness. Critics point out that published ranges can be wide to the point of meaninglessness — "$80,000–$200,000" technically complies while telling a candidate almost nothing useful. Companies have also been documented setting ranges retroactively to match where they planned to offer anyway.
The more interesting long-term question is what happens to internal pay equity. When employees start comparing their salaries to published ranges for open roles — and they do — companies face pressure to explain the gaps. This is, arguably, the more disruptive effect of the laws. The external posting is compliance; the internal reckoning is culture change.
At 29.4% and climbing, we're not at full disclosure. But the direction is unmistakable. The old default — say nothing, make them ask — is no longer viable for any company competing for remote tech talent. Six years of legislation, compounded by remote work's erasure of geographic compliance gaps, has made pay opacity the exception rather than the rule.
Further Reading
Data sourced from Hacker News "Who is Hiring?" monthly threads via Algolia HN Search API and Firebase HN API. Salary detection includes: $NNk patterns, salary/compensation/pay range mentions, TC references, and hourly rate disclosures.