A range is not an answer

The number arrived

The law can make a company publish a number. It cannot make that number mean anything.

Disclosure has spread quickly. Indeed Hiring Lab reported in July that 57 percent of Canadian job postings carried pay information in June 2026, against roughly 20 percent six years earlier. Ontario alone moved from 49 percent to 71 percent in a single year after its posting rule took effect on the first of January. The same analysis puts the United States at 49 percent.

The rules keep arriving. Eighteen states and the District of Columbia now carry statewide pay transparency laws, reaching roughly half the American workforce (GovDocs, 2026). Virginia's took effect on July 1 and Maine's on July 29. Connecticut's arrives on October 1 and applies to every employer in the state, with no headcount minimum.

That is real progress, and it is worth saying so before saying anything else.

The band that replaced the number

Then look at what is actually being published. In Ontario, the market with the newest rule and the sharpest jump, only 16 percent of pay-transparent postings named an exact figure. The rest gave a band. And the bands grew wider as compliance rose, from a median 18 percent between floor and ceiling in the first half of 2026, up from 16 percent a year earlier (Indeed Hiring Lab, July 2026).

Eighteen percent on a $90,000 floor is more than $16,000 of unanswered question. Enough to decide whether the role is worth an evening. Enough to decide whether it is worth leaving the job you already have.

That width reading is Ontario, not the whole continent. But it is the market that just did what every other market is being told to do, which makes it the closest thing to a preview.

Some lawmakers saw it coming. California rewrote its definition of “pay scale” on the first of January to mean a good faith estimate of what the employer actually expects to pay, a rule aimed squarely at the range so broad it commits to nothing.

What width does to the reader

New research says the band is not neutral. SHRM reported on July 28 on a study from Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in February by Alice Lee, Tae-Youn Park and Sungyong Chang. Across four studies, including an archival analysis of nearly 10 million United States postings and a field experiment with people making real application decisions, women showed a stronger preference for narrower ranges than men, which Lee attributes largely to differences in risk aversion.

So a band wide enough to cover every possible hire quietly sorts who applies at all.

The effect does not stop at the application. Candidates who chose the narrower ranges went on to negotiate less assertively, asked for less, and were more content with an offer at the midpoint.

The same research found the repair. When an ad added context, the typical starting salary and how final offers are determined, the gender difference in both applying and negotiating disappeared. Nothing elaborate. The employer simply said more.

What a posting owes a stranger

A person deciding whether to spend an evening on an application is making that decision with the other side's information. The employer knows what the work pays. The applicant is estimating. A range wide enough to be true of almost anyone satisfies the statute and moves none of that.

Our view is plain. A salary range in job postings is not a compliance exercise. It is the first honest thing a company can say to someone who has not yet given it anything.

CoBlack cannot make an employer name its number. What it can do is stop charging the candidate to find out. Auto Search reads validated employer career pages and ATS feeds. Auto Match states plainly why a role fits against a person's Career Capability Map. Auto Apply files the application server-side, so the hours once spent discovering a mismatch are not spent at all.

Transparency is not a number appearing in a posting. It is the reader knowing what to do with it.