Think about how much of your life is decided by a number you weren't allowed to see. You spend hours on an application, a screening call, two rounds of interviews, a "culture fit" lunch — and only at the very end, after all your leverage is gone, does anyone tell you what the job actually pays. Maybe it's half what you assumed. By then you've invested so much you take it anyway. That asymmetry — they know the number, you don't — was the whole game, and it was tilted against the worker at every step.
As of January 1, 2025, Minnesota flipped it.
What the law requires
Minn. Stat. § 181.173 is short and to the point. An employer with 30 or more employees in Minnesota "must disclose in each posting for each job opening" the starting salary range — a real minimum and maximum, based on a good-faith estimate — "and a general description of all of the benefits and other compensation," including health and retirement benefits.
And it closes the obvious dodges. The range "may not be open ended" — no "$40,000 and up" or "up to $200,000" that tells you nothing. If the employer isn't offering a range at all, it has to list a single fixed pay rate. The rule covers postings done directly or through a recruiter, online or on paper. "Competitive salary" and "DOE" are, in Minnesota, no longer legal answers to the question of what a job pays.
Why such a small rule does so much
Because information is leverage, and this quietly hands some back to the worker. Three things happen when the number is in the ad:
You stop wasting your life on jobs that can't pay you. A range up front means you never again burn three weeks of interviews to discover the salary is impossible. That's your time back.
The negotiation starts from the truth. When you already know the band is $75,000–$95,000, you're not blindly guessing and hoping you didn't lowball yourself by twenty grand. The classic advice "never name your number first" only mattered because the employer hid theirs. Now the field is level.
It attacks pay gaps at the root. Here's the part that reaches beyond any one applicant. Pay disparities by gender and race persist in large part because pay is secret — the people most likely to be underpaid are the least likely to know they're being lowballed, and the least positioned to push. When the range is public, the woman and the man applying for the same job start from the same posted number. Transparency does more against the pay gap than exhortation ever has, and it does it without a lawsuit, a quota, or a dime of public money. That's why versions of this law are among the most popular things any legislature passes — it polls across the political spectrum, because everyone has been on the losing side of a hidden number.
The honest limits
I'll be fair about the gripes. Some employers genuinely dislike posting ranges — they worry current employees will see that new hires are offered more (which is often true, and arguably the point), and that competitors learn their pay bands. A "good-faith estimate" range can also be written so wide ($50,000–$150,000) that it barely informs anyone, and the law's real test is whether enforcement polices those meaningless ranges. And it covers employers with 30-plus workers, so the smallest shops are exempt. These are reasons to enforce the law well, not reasons the number should go back to being a secret.
What we can do
Police the meaningless range. The one way to gut this law is the absurdly wide band. Enforcement — by the state, with the Attorney General's consumer-protection backing — should treat a $50k–$150k "range" for a defined job as the non-disclosure it really is.
Keep it simple and keep it broad. Resist efforts to riddle it with exemptions. The strength of § 181.173 is that it's clean: the pay goes in the ad, period.
Pair it with the pay-history reform. Transparency works best alongside limits on forcing applicants to disclose their salary history — because past underpayment is how underpayment follows a person their whole career. Publish the range; stop anchoring offers to what someone made before.
A job ad that hides the pay is a negotiation rigged before you say a word. Minnesota decided the number belongs in the ad. It's a small sentence of law that quietly makes every hire a little fairer.
First the facts. Then the fix.
Sources
Minn. Stat. § 181.173 (Salary Ranges Required in Job Postings), enacted 2024 (2024 Minn. Laws ch. 110, art. 7), effective January 1, 2025, verified against raw text at revisor.mn.gov: the coverage of employers with 30 or more employees at one or more Minnesota sites (subd. 1(b)); the definition of "salary range" as the good-faith minimum and maximum annual salary or hourly compensation (subd. 1(d)); the requirement to disclose in each posting the starting salary range and a general description of benefits and other compensation (subd. 2(a)); and the prohibition on open-ended ranges, requiring a fixed pay rate where no range is offered (subd. 2(b)). The connection between pay secrecy and persistent gender and racial pay gaps, and the cross-partisan popularity of pay-transparency laws, are characterized from widely reported research and polling and were not re-derived from primary sources this pass.
Enforcement mechanics and any Minnesota guidance on impermissibly wide "good-faith" ranges were not pulled verbatim this pass and are described in general terms. Corrections: campaign@madgettformn.com.