Massachusetts Pay Gap Reporting: What You Need to Know

To find the full text, refer to the Massachusetts Act for Salary Range Transparency, which amends the Massachusetts Equal Pay Act.

The Massachusetts pay transparency and reporting law imposes requirements on employers with over 25 employees in the Commonwealth. Massachusetts joins a growing list of states and counties in the U.S. to require more pay transparency.

Here’s a summary of what is required by the law:

• Job postings: Employers must include the salary range for each position in job postings.
• Promotions and transfers: Employers must provide the salary range for new positions to employees offered promotions or transfers with different job responsibilities.
• Employee requests: Upon request, employers must provide the salary range for an employee’s current position or for a position they applied for.
• Annual EEO and “Pay Data” reporting: Private employers with 100 or more Massachusetts employees must submit EEO-1 to the Commonwealth annually for aggregated public reporting by the Massachusetts Department of Labor. While Massachusetts law indicates that employers must submit “wage data”, it’s not actually required. Employers in Massachusetts will only be required to submit pay data if the federal government reinstates pay data collection. This is not currently required in the U.S. and it is highly unlikely that the Trump Administration will reinstate this requirement, after ending the practice during the first Trump Administration.

The EEO-1 report is a mandatory data collection report that analyzes workforce demographics. Employers with more than 100 employees in the United States (or fewer for federal contractors) file the report annually with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

To prepare the report, employers categorize their workforce into 10 broad job categories, like First and Mid-Level Managers, Professionals, Operations, and Technicians. These broad categories are called EEO-1 job categories (or sometimes called “EEO-1 groups”). Employers also report the gender and race/ethnicity of their workforce, by work location (establishment) within different job categories, which help assess representation across an organization.

Currently, no wage (pay) information is reported on the EEO-1 report.