Pay Transparency for City Employees Under New York City’s Human Rights Commission Regulations and a Newly Improved Tax Disclosure Procedure

Written advertisements for a job, promotion or transfer opportunity that are “publicized to a pool of potential applicants” are covered, including internal bulletin boards, internet and newspaper ads and printed flyers that are handed out at job fairs, according to the legislation.

Employers are required to post the minimum and maximum amounts they are willing to pay “the employer honestly believes at the time they are listing the job advertisement that they are willing to pay the successful applicant(s),” the memo says.

The New York City Human Rights Commission has a set of guidelines for employers with more than four employees. The four employees include the owner of the company, and all four do not have to work in New York; as long as one is based in the city, the company is subject to the measure.

All employment agencies, regardless of their size, must include salaries in their postings. Temporary help firms are exempt, though the companies they match potential employees with must follow the law.

Employers who violate the salary transparency requirements will have 30 days to correct their actions, through paying damages to affected employees, administering training and changing the listings. Employers can be fined up to $250,000 if they don’t comply.

It’s not unusual for two people with the same title to be paid somewhat different salaries. It is possible to make a living from paying based on a person’s experience and performance, market rate when they were hired, and their negotiation skills.

New York City’s pay transparency law doesn’t mandate that the actual offer a company makes to a candidate falls within the advertised range. That range simply represents to prospective employees a good faith estimate of what they can expect in salary, before counting variable compensation like signing bonuses, annual bonuses or equity.

When you random search online for jobs, you’ll see a lot that are relatively narrow, but some that are large so you could drive a truck through them. A vice president of human resources is paid up to $263,000 a year. A news editor’s salary can go as high as $180,000. Are you talking about a VP in marketing? Roughly $197,000 to $366,000.

The risk of setting too wide of a pay range is because employers don’t adequately explain why in the ad. She said candidates are more likely to think a company is fair if it has a narrow range. “You destroy trust … if you post too broad a salary range.”

When a company chooses to hire in different cities and just post a single ad for each, it may reflect cost-of-labor differences that aren’t reflected in a wide salary range. For example, the high end of the range could be for a candidate living in a high cost city like New York, but might not apply to a candidate living in Kansas City.

Or an employer might have five different levels of pay for someone with a title of manager, based on experience, said career expert Kimberly Brown, founder of leadership development company Manifest Yourself.

What can you do to get what you pay? An employment attorney at Ogletree Deakins, NJ, said in a first of its kind

And some employers may be experimenting to see what works. This is the first of its kind for companies. … It could be seeing how far they can go with this,” said Kelly Cardin, an employment attorney at Ogletree Deakins

“There’s nothing forcing employers to pay what’s within the range,” said Jose Rios Lua, the executive director of communications for the NYC Commission on Human Rights.

That means job candidates – and current employees who want to make more – still need to engage in salary negotiations, Brown said. “You should still negotiate always.”

She recommends continuing to research pay for a position by using online sites such as LinkedIn and Glassdoor, as well as tapping your professional network to get a better ballpark sense of what people in the role you seek are currently paid. It is important to be realistic about the experience you bring to a job because that is part of setting pay.

If you happen to bring all the experience an employer is looking for and then some, you can negotiate for more than the top end of the advertised range, Brown suggested. “The max isn’t always the max.”