Massachusetts pay transparency law: the Frances Perkins Act

Massachusetts requires employers with 25 or more employees in the state to include a pay range in every job posting, whether the employer posts it directly or a recruiter posts it on the employer's behalf. The rule is the Frances Perkins Workplace Equity Act, codified at General Laws chapter 149, section 105F, and it took effect October 29, 2025. A separate part of the same act requires larger employers to file a pay data report with the state, which is a different obligation with its own threshold and deadline.

The statute and who enforces it

The law commonly called the Frances Perkins Workplace Equity Act was signed July 31, 2024, as House Bill 4890, "An Act relative to salary range transparency" (Chapter 141 of the Acts of 2024). The job-posting disclosure requirement is codified at General Laws chapter 149, section 105F. It was originally scheduled to take effect July 31, 2025, but a drafting technicality pushed the effective date to October 29, 2025, which is the date most guidance now treats as the operative one. The Attorney General's Fair Labor Division enforces the posting requirement; the Commonwealth's guidance is published at mass.gov/info-details/pay-transparency-in-massachusetts.

Which employers are covered

The job-posting rule applies to employers with 25 or more employees in Massachusetts. The disclosure duty covers any advertisement or job posting intended to recruit applicants for a particular, specific position, regardless of whether the employer placed the ad itself or a third party, such as a recruiter or staffing firm, placed it on the employer's behalf. The same obligation extends to an existing employee who is offered a promotion or a transfer into a new position with different job responsibilities: the employer has to give that employee the pay range for the new role.

This 25-employee threshold is separate from, and lower than, the 100-employee threshold that triggers the act's pay data reporting duty, covered below. A mid-sized Massachusetts employer can easily be covered by the posting rule well before it is anywhere near the reporting rule, so do not assume the two obligations arrive together.

The statute counts employees "in the commonwealth," which is a narrower test than the "employer has one worker based here" approach Washington and Illinois use, elsewhere in this series, for their own headcount thresholds. A national employer with thousands of employees overall but only a small Massachusetts office should count only the Massachusetts-based headcount, not the company's total workforce, when deciding whether the 25-employee posting duty applies to a given opening.

What must appear in the posting

A covered posting must state the pay range: the annual salary range or hourly wage range the employer reasonably and in good faith expects to pay for the position at the time of the posting. Unlike Washington, Illinois or Maryland, elsewhere in this series, Massachusetts's statute does not pair the pay range with a mandatory benefits description; the posting duty here is limited to compensation. Employers are free to add a benefits summary voluntarily, and many already do for other reasons, but the statute itself does not require it.

Because the standard is "reasonably and in good faith," the same practical rule used across this series applies: a range needs a real floor and ceiling that reflects what the employer would actually pay a qualified candidate, not a wide band chosen to avoid narrowing the field, and not a single inflated number meant to attract more applicants than the role could realistically support.

The separate pay data reporting requirement

The second half of the Frances Perkins Workplace Equity Act is a pay data reporting duty that is easy to confuse with the job-posting rule because both come from the same bill. Employers with 100 or more employees in Massachusetts at any point in the prior calendar year, and that are already required to file a federal EEO report (the EEO-1, EEO-3, EEO-4 or EEO-5, depending on the type of employer), must submit that same federally required report to the Commonwealth. The first submission was due February 2, 2026, filed through the Secretary of the Commonwealth's online portal, and the requirement recurs annually. The Commonwealth then aggregates the submitted data and publishes statewide wage and workforce figures, with the first publication due by June 1, 2026. This reporting duty does not apply to smaller employers that only meet the 25-employee posting threshold; it has its own, higher bar.

What a candidate or employee may ask for, and when

Because the posting itself has to carry the pay range, a Massachusetts applicant's main protection is seeing the range before applying rather than having to request it. For an internal move, the statute's promotion-and-transfer language means an employee moving into a role with different responsibilities is entitled to the pay range for that new role as part of the process, the same as an external applicant would see it in a posting.

The "different job responsibilities" qualifier matters in practice. A lateral move or a title change with the same duties and the same pay band is not the kind of promotion or transfer that triggers a fresh disclosure under the statute. A move into a role with meaningfully different responsibilities, even without a formal new posting, is what the disclosure duty is aimed at, so an employer restructuring a team should treat "does this role's responsibilities actually change" as the test, not just "did we change the job title."

Penalties and who enforces them

The Attorney General's office enforces the posting requirement with an escalating schedule: a warning for a first offense, a fine of up to $500 for a second offense, up to $1,000 for a third offense, and a fourth or later offense falls under the general wage-law civil penalty provision at G.L. c. 149, section 27C, which can reach up to $25,000. For the first two years the law is in effect, through October 29, 2027, an employer that receives notice of a violation has two business days to correct it before a fine applies, which is a shorter cure window than Washington's five business days or Illinois's tiered 7-to-14-day periods elsewhere in this series.

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

The statute is explicit that the posting duty follows the advertisement regardless of who placed it, so a recruiting or staffing firm posting a Massachusetts client's role, where the client has 25 or more Massachusetts employees, has to include the pay range in its own version of the listing even if the client's internal posting already has it correct. Because the cure window is only two business days during the law's first two years, an agency that gets flagged for a missing range has very little time to react compared with other states in this series, which makes catching the omission before the posting goes live far more valuable here than fixing it after a complaint arrives. Build a hard stop into requisition intake: no Massachusetts posting for a 25-plus-employee client goes live without a pay range already attached.

A posting checklist for Massachusetts

MASSACHUSETTS JOB POSTING CHECKLIST

[ ] Employer (or client, if this is an agency posting) has 25+ employees
    in Massachusetts
[ ] Posting states an annual salary range or hourly wage range, reasonably
    and in good faith expected at the time of posting
[ ] Range has a real floor and ceiling, not a single inflated figure
[ ] If this is a promotion or transfer to a role with different
    responsibilities, the employee was given the pay range for the new role
[ ] If a recruiter or staffing firm is posting this role, the pay range is
    in that posting too, not only the client's own listing
[ ] Team knows any notice of a missing range gets fixed within 2 business
    days (through October 29, 2027) to avoid a fine
[ ] Separately: if the employer has 100+ Massachusetts employees and files
    a federal EEO report, that report is also being submitted to the state
    by the annual February 2 deadline

How Massachusetts compares with the rest of this series

Massachusetts is the only state in this series that pairs a job-posting rule with a separate, higher-threshold pay data reporting duty in the same statute, and its two-business-day cure window is the shortest grace period any state here gives an employer to fix a flagged posting. Its "no benefits line required" posting rule puts it closer to California, which likewise requires only the pay figure, than to the benefits-plus-pay approach Washington, Illinois and Maryland use. 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.