Illinois pay transparency law: the Equal Pay Act posting rules

Illinois requires employers with 15 or more employees, where the role touches Illinois in any way, to include the pay scale and benefits in every specific job posting. The rule sits in the Illinois Equal Pay Act of 2003, amended to add this duty effective January 1, 2025, and the Illinois Department of Labor (IDOL) tightened its implementing rules again effective June 18, 2026, with a tiered penalty structure that gets meaningfully more expensive on a second and third offense.

The statute and who enforces it

The requirement is 820 ILCS 112/10, part of the Equal Pay Act of 2003, added by Public Act 103-0539 and in effect since January 1, 2025. The Illinois Department of Labor administers the law and publishes guidance, including a "Pay Transparency 101" explainer, at labor.illinois.gov. IDOL adopted amendments to its implementing administrative rules on June 18, 2026, which introduced new definitions, extended the law's reach to more remote and hybrid arrangements, and replaced the earlier penalty schedule with a steeper tiered one.

Which employers are covered

Coverage requires 15 or more employees, and applies to a position that will be performed at least in part in Illinois, or a remote position that reports to a supervisor, office or work site in Illinois. As with the other states in this series that use a similar test, the location of the potential worker, not the employer's own address, decides whether a given posting is covered.

Illinois does not carve out employment agencies or staffing firms from the definition of employer. Section 112/10(b-20) explicitly extends the disclosure duty to "an employer or employment agency," so a recruiting firm placing candidates directly onto a client's payroll is covered on the same terms as the client itself.

The June 2026 rule amendments were pitched in part as closing gaps around hybrid and remote arrangements, so an employer that has treated a hybrid Illinois role as outside the law's reach because the job posting did not mention Illinois by name should re-check that assumption against the current IDOL guidance rather than the original 2025 rule text.

What must appear in the posting

Every specific job posting from a covered employer must include:

• The pay scale: the hourly wage or salary, or the range, the employer reasonably expects in good faith to offer for the position, given the candidate's qualifications, the employer's finances and other circumstances relevant to that specific role.
• Benefits, described in general terms, and any other compensation the employer reasonably expects to offer, such as bonuses, commission or stock.

IDOL guidance draws a clear line on vague ranges: "$40,000 and up" with no ceiling, "up to $60,000" with no floor, and qualified phrasing like "starting at $50,000, depending on experience" all fail the good-faith standard, because none of them tells an applicant the actual bounds of what the employer might pay.

A posting can satisfy the requirement with a hyperlink instead of the number directly on the page, but only if the link goes straight to the pay scale and benefits for that specific position. A link to a general compensation philosophy page, or a lengthy document covering many roles at once, does not meet the standard.

If an employer engages a third party, an agency, job board or any other intermediary, to make the posting known, the employer must give that third party the pay scale and benefits, or the qualifying hyperlink, and the third party must include it in the posting once received.

The 14-day internal notice for promotional opportunities

When a covered employer, or a third party acting for it, externally publishes a specific job posting, the employer must make that opportunity known to its current employees within 14 days, so existing staff have a genuine chance to be considered alongside outside candidates. This sits alongside, not instead of, the pay scale and benefits disclosure; both duties apply to the same posting.

What a candidate or employee may ask for, and when

If no public or internal posting was made available to a particular applicant, the employer or employment agency must still disclose the pay scale and benefits for the position before any offer or discussion of compensation takes place, and again at the applicant's request. In other words, the absence of a formal posting does not excuse the employer from disclosure; it only changes when the disclosure has to happen, from "in the ad" to "before you talk about numbers."

Records the employer must keep

The Act requires an employer to make and preserve records showing the name, address and occupation of each employee, the wages paid to each employee, the pay scale and benefits for each position, and the job posting for each position, along with any other information IDOL specifies by rule. These records must be kept for at least five years, the longest retention period of any state covered in this series.

Penalties and who enforces them

IDOL's rules adopted June 18, 2026 set a tiered civil penalty structure:

Once an employer reaches a third offense, that top penalty tier applies automatically to any further violation for five years, and the five-year clock resets with each new violation notice. A noncompliant posting that is no longer active, meaning it has already expired or been removed, does not get a cure period at any tier. IDOL investigates complaints, and under a policy effective January 1, 2026, an anonymous pay transparency complaint can itself trigger an investigation, which is a meaningfully lower bar than most states in this series where a complainant has to identify themselves.

The cure periods matter operationally more than the headline dollar figures do for most recruiters. A team that reviews its live postings on a regular cadence, rather than only when a complaint arrives, is the difference between a first-offense $500 exposure with two weeks to fix everything and a third-offense $10,000 exposure with no way to cure it at all. Treat the tiers as a reason to audit postings proactively, not just a fine schedule to keep in a compliance binder.

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

Illinois treats an employment agency as directly responsible under the statute, not merely as a channel the employer's obligation flows through. That means a staffing agency placing candidates onto a client's Illinois payroll needs the pay scale and benefits from the client before the posting goes live, the same as it would need a job title or location, and needs to apply the good-faith range test itself rather than assuming the client's own number already clears the bar. Because the rule also covers disclosure at the point of a compensation discussion even without a formal posting, an agency running phone screens off a client req that was never formally posted still owes the candidate the pay scale before that conversation turns to numbers. With five-year record retention and a tiered penalty schedule that gets expensive fast on repeat findings, building the pay scale and benefits capture into requisition intake, rather than treating it as something to gather later, is the more defensible process for an agency working Illinois roles.

A posting checklist for Illinois

ILLINOIS JOB POSTING CHECKLIST

[ ] Employer (or agency) has 15+ employees
[ ] Role performed at least in part in Illinois, OR remote and reports to
    an Illinois supervisor, office or work site
[ ] Posting states a specific pay scale (range or fixed rate), not "DOE"
    or "competitive"
[ ] Range has both a real floor and a real ceiling
[ ] Benefits and other compensation described in general terms
[ ] If using a hyperlink instead of an inline number, it leads directly to
    this position's pay scale and benefits, not a general compensation page
[ ] Pay scale and benefits were sent to any third party posting this role,
    before the posting went live
[ ] Current employees will be notified of this opening within 14 days of
    the external posting going up
[ ] If no posting exists for this opening, pay scale and benefits will be
    disclosed to the applicant before any compensation discussion
[ ] Records (pay scale, benefits, the posting itself, wages paid) will be
    kept for at least 5 years

Illinois pairs its posting duty with the longest recordkeeping window in this series, five years, and a tiered penalty schedule that most other states covered here do not use. Its 15-employee threshold matches California and Washington, and, like Colorado, it puts an affirmative internal-notice duty on the employer rather than leaving that step to the applicant's discretion. For the full state-by-state comparison, see pay transparency laws by state. For phrasing that asks about pay expectations without crossing into a history question, see salary expectation questions, and for the broader list of topics to avoid in an interview, see illegal interview questions.