New Jersey pay transparency law: the Pay and Benefit Transparency Act

New Jersey requires employers with 10 or more employees, counted over 20 calendar weeks and including workers outside the state, to disclose an hourly wage or salary range and a general benefits description in job postings for roles connected to New Jersey. The rule is the Pay and Benefit Transparency Act, in effect since June 1, 2025, and it applies to a broader set of employers than the headcount alone suggests, since companies with no New Jersey office can still be covered if they take applications from the state.

The statute and who enforces it

The Pay and Benefit Transparency Act took effect June 1, 2025 and is administered by the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development (NJDOL), which publishes guidance at nj.gov/labor/myworkrights/wages/pay-transparency. NJDOL published proposed implementing rules on September 15, 2025, with a public comment period that closed November 14, 2025; as of September 2026, the Department's own guidance recommends employers follow the proposed rules until final rules are adopted, since the underlying statute is already in force regardless of the rulemaking timeline.

Which employers are covered

The Act covers employers with 10 or more employees over 20 calendar weeks, and that figure counts employees both inside and outside New Jersey. An employer is covered if it does business in New Jersey, employs people in the state, or accepts job applications from New Jersey, which is a wider net than a simple "do you have a New Jersey office" test. The NJDOL page is explicit that this coverage can reach multistate employers and companies hiring remote workers even without a physical New Jersey presence, as long as they take applications from the state.

That last point is where New Jersey catches employers who assume they are out of reach. A company with no New Jersey office and no New Jersey-based staff, but with a careers page that accepts applications from anyone, anywhere, including New Jersey residents, meets the Act's coverage test the moment it has 10 employees total over 20 calendar weeks, counted nationally. Recruiters used to thinking of coverage in terms of "do we have an office or employee there" should instead ask "could someone in New Jersey submit an application for this role," since that is the test the statute actually uses.

What must appear in the posting

A covered posting, internal or external, must include:

• The hourly wage or salary, or a range covering it.
• A general description of benefits: health insurance, life insurance, disability coverage, paid time off, retirement, and similar offerings.
• Other compensation programs: commissions, bonuses, profit-sharing, and similar pay tied to the role.

A range cannot be open-ended: "$120,000 and up," with no ceiling, does not satisfy the Act. New Jersey's guidance adds a constraint most other states in this series do not use: the spread between the minimum and the maximum of a posted range cannot exceed 60% of the minimum. A range of $100,000 to $200,000 is a 100% spread and would not comply; a range like $100,000 to $155,000, a 55% spread, stays under the limit. This requirement applies to internal and external postings alike, whether published online, on a printed poster or flyer, or through any similar advertisement, and it reaches nationwide postings if the employer otherwise meets the Act's coverage test.

For internal promotional opportunities, the Act requires "reasonable efforts" to notify current employees in the affected department, which NJDOL's guidance describes as satisfied by a physical posting in workplace locations visible to those employees, or a posting on the employer's internet or intranet site if it has one. This is a lighter internal-notice duty than Colorado's or Illinois's specific timelines elsewhere in this series; New Jersey does not set a fixed number of days, only a reasonableness standard tied to where affected employees would actually see the notice.

In practice, this means the compliance bar for promotions is lower than the bar for the external posting itself: there is no requirement to publish a formal external-style listing for an internal move, only to make the opportunity genuinely visible to the employees it affects, wherever they would normally look for that kind of notice. A posting taped to a breakroom bulletin board that nobody in the affected department passes by is unlikely to satisfy a "reasonable efforts" standard; a posting on the intranet page that department already checks daily is a much stronger fit for the same requirement.

What a candidate or employee may ask for, and when

Because the range has to be in the posting itself for most covered employers, a New Jersey applicant's main protection is seeing the figures before applying. The one significant exception is for temporary help service firms and consulting firms, covered in the staffing section below, where the applicant instead receives the wage and benefit information at the time of the interview or at hire, rather than in the posting.

Records the employer must keep

The Act's text and NJDOL's published page do not spell out a wage-transparency-specific document retention period the way Illinois's or Colorado's statutes in this series do. Until the final implementing rules settle the question, the safer practice is to keep a copy of each posting as published, the wage range and benefits used to build it, and any documentation showing the range's spread stayed within the 60% limit, for as long as you would keep other hiring records for that requisition.

Penalties and who enforces them

NJDOL enforces the Act with a civil penalty of up to $300 for a first violation and up to $600 for each subsequent violation. A single job posting that runs across multiple platforms at once counts as one violation if it is noncompliant, but separate postings for separate openings on the same platform are each counted individually. Complaints can be filed online, by mail or by fax, and should include a copy of the posting with its dates and, if available, the URL where it ran.

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

New Jersey draws a specific line for staffing that most other states in this series do not: temporary help service firms and consulting firms are exempt from including the wage and benefit information in the job posting itself, and instead must provide that information to the individual at the time of the interview or at hire. This is a meaningfully different rule from New York's temp-firm exclusion, which removes the posting duty for temporary help firms entirely; New Jersey does not remove the disclosure duty, it only moves when the disclosure happens, from the ad to the interview or offer stage. A firm that runs a mixed model, direct placement onto a client's own payroll for some roles and temp staffing on the firm's own payroll for others, should treat direct placements as fully subject to the posting rule (including the 60% spread limit) and reserve the interview-or-hire-disclosure approach for genuine temporary assignments. Given that the implementing rules were still proposed rather than final as of September 2026, an agency working New Jersey roles should watch for the final rule and be ready to adjust exactly how that line is drawn.

An example compliant posting

The following is an invented example for illustration, not a real job order, and shows a range that stays within the 60% spread limit.

Logistics Coordinator — Newark, NJ (on-site)
Example Meridian Freight Solutions (invented company, for illustration only)

Hourly wage: $24.00–$36.00 per hour (a 50% spread from the minimum,
within New Jersey's 60% limit), based on experience with freight
scheduling systems.

Benefits: medical and dental coverage; paid sick leave; 401(k)
eligible after 90 days; tuition assistance for logistics
certifications.

Other compensation: weekly attendance bonus of $50, paid for
each full week with no unexcused absence.

How New Jersey compares with the rest of this series

New Jersey's 60% range-spread cap is unique among the states in this series; every other state in this group bans only open-ended ranges, without a numeric limit on how wide a compliant range can be, which makes a range that would pass muster in California or Massachusetts still worth rechecking against New Jersey's specific math before the same posting runs there. Its temp-firm rule, moving disclosure to the interview rather than removing it, also sits between New York's full exemption and the no-exemption approach California, Colorado and Illinois take. 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.