Colorado pay transparency law: the strictest posting rules explained

Colorado requires every employer with at least one employee in the state, regardless of total company size, to disclose compensation, benefits and an application deadline in every job posting, and to give current employees notice of most openings before selecting a candidate. The law is the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, and its posting rules are the broadest of any state covered in this series: no headcount threshold, and disclosure duties that reach beyond the posting itself into internal notice and post-selection transparency.

The statute and who enforces it

The law is the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, C.R.S. § 8-5-101 et seq., with the job posting and notice duties at § 8-5-201. The original transparency requirements took effect January 1, 2021. A significant set of amendments, adding the application-deadline disclosure and reworking the internal notice rules, took effect January 1, 2024. The Colorado Department of Labor and Employment (CDLE) administers the law through its Division of Labor Standards and Statistics, and has published its interpretation in a series of Interpretive Notice and Formal Opinion documents, including INFO #9 and INFO #9A, covering job postings, internal notices and the amendments.

Which employers are covered

Unlike every other state in this series, Colorado sets no minimum employee count. The Act reaches any employer, public or private, with at least one worker in Colorado, including a remote worker for a company with no physical Colorado office. A national employer posting one role that a Colorado-based candidate could fill is covered for that posting even if the company has no other tie to the state.

A narrower carve-out applies only to the internal notice duty, not the posting duty. Employers with no physical location in Colorado and fewer than 15 Colorado-based employees, all of them remote, only have to give internal notice of remote job opportunities rather than every opportunity company-wide. That provision is scheduled to sunset July 1, 2029. It does not reduce what has to appear in the external posting itself; it only narrows which internal openings a small remote-only employer has to announce to its existing Colorado staff.

What must appear in the posting

Every job posting for a Colorado position, or a remote position a Colorado-based person could fill, must include:

• Compensation: the hourly or salary rate, or range, the employer genuinely expects to pay, reflecting the whole range the employer is willing to pay for that specific opening, not a company-wide band for the job title.
• A general description of bonus, commission or other compensation tied to the role, if any.
• A general description of benefits the employer is offering for the position.
• The date the application window is anticipated to close. If there is no set closing date, CDLE guidance calls for saying so rather than leaving the topic out.

If pay for the role would differ depending on where the employee is based, the Colorado-facing posting must give the range that would actually apply to a Colorado hire, including any Colorado-specific minimum wage floor, not a broader nationwide range that could understate or overstate what a Colorado candidate would be paid.

Internal notice and what happens after you fill the role

Colorado's law does not stop at the external posting. A covered employer must make reasonable efforts to announce, post or otherwise make known each job opportunity to current employees on the same calendar day it posts the opportunity externally, and in every case before selecting a candidate. The 2023 amendments, effective January 1, 2024, redefined this in terms of a "job opportunity," meaning a current or anticipated vacancy the employer is considering candidates for or has posted externally, rather than the older, broader "promotion" language, and removed the separate duty to flag every internal move as a promotion.

For most postings, after a candidate is selected the employer must make reasonably available to the employees who applied the job title of the position and the compensation of the person selected. Automatic career progressions, meaning a move into a role based on a defined, non-discretionary formula rather than a competitive process, do not have to be posted or announced in the first place; if any part of the decision involves managerial discretion, performance rankings or similar subjective judgment, CDLE guidance treats it as a job opportunity that needs the same posting and notice as any other opening.

What a candidate or employee may ask for, and when

Because Colorado requires the range in the posting itself, there is no separate "ask and we'll tell you" mechanism the way some other states use for smaller employers. The practical rights for a candidate or employee are the posting itself, the internal notice of the opportunity before a candidate is chosen, and, once someone is selected, visibility into who got the role and at what compensation, so that an employee who did not get promoted can see whether the process matches what was represented.

Records the employer must keep

CDLE guidance requires an employer to keep, for each employee, records of that employee's job description and compensation, including wage or salary, benefits, and all bonuses, commissions and other compensation received, along with a history of any changes to job description or compensation over time. Records must be kept for the duration of the employee's employment plus two years after it ends. If an employer cannot produce these records when a wage-discrimination claim is brought, the absence of records supports an inference against the employer.

Penalties and who enforces them

The CDLE director may order an employer found in violation to pay a fine of not less than $500 and not more than $10,000 per violation, and each noncompliant posting or missed notice is treated as a separate violation, so a single unposted range across several job boards can multiply quickly. As of July 2024, the department reported having received 1,634 complaints and assessed a combined $238,000 in fines since the law's transparency provisions took effect, according to CDLE's own reporting current as of that date. Separately, the 2023 amendments extended how far back an employee can recover back pay in a wage-discrimination claim, from three years to six years before the claim is filed.

What it means for a staffing agency posting a client's role

Colorado's Act does not carve out staffing or recruiting agencies the way New York does for temporary help firms. An agency posting a Colorado role, or a remote role a Colorado-based candidate could fill, is itself making a job posting and is expected to include the compensation, benefits and application-deadline information the Act requires, whether or not the client has separately posted the same role. Because the law has no size threshold, agency size and client size are both irrelevant to whether the posting duty applies; the only question is whether the role could be filled by someone in Colorado. Build the intake step into your requisition process rather than relying on the client to supply a compliant posting: if the client's own version of the posting is missing the deadline or benefits line, your agency's copy needs to add it before it goes live.

A posting checklist for Colorado

COLORADO JOB POSTING CHECKLIST

[ ] Role could be filled by someone in Colorado (remote or on-site) — no
    company size test applies, one Colorado worker is enough
[ ] Posting states the compensation rate or range actually expected to be
    paid for a Colorado hire, including any Colorado minimum wage floor
[ ] Bonus, commission or other incentive pay is described in general terms
[ ] Benefits are described in general terms
[ ] Application deadline is stated, or the posting says there is none
[ ] Current employees were given notice of this opportunity on the same day
    it was posted externally, before any candidate was selected
[ ] This is not an automatic, formula-based career progression — if it
    involves any discretion, it needs its own posting and notice
[ ] Plan in place to make the selected candidate's job title and
    compensation reasonably available to employees who applied
[ ] Job description and full compensation history will be kept for this
    employee for the duration of employment plus 2 years after

Colorado and Maryland are the only two states in this series with no employer-size threshold, but Colorado goes further by also requiring an application deadline, internal same-day notice and post-selection disclosure, none of which Maryland's statute requires. That extra layer is also why Colorado complaints and fines have run higher, in absolute terms, than most other states in this series report: the law simply gives a candidate or employee more distinct things to check a posting against. For the full state-by-state comparison, see pay transparency laws by state. For how to ask about pay expectations without straying into a history question, see salary expectation questions, and for a broader list of topics to avoid in an interview, see illegal interview questions.