Virginia Pay Transparency: What Business Leaders Need to Know
As of July 1st, Virginia is the latest state to pass new legislation requiring salary bands on all job postings, regardless of organization size. This law change has generated some anxiety in the business community, but Sandbox sees it as an opportunity!
We love seeing laws like these take effect, enshrining what’s become standard practice in other states and industries while ensuring equal enforcement across organizations. According to the National Women’s Law Center, research consistently links pay range transparency to narrowed gender wage gaps.
This new law creates an opportunity for organizations to build stronger systems: clear pay bands, visual career paths, structured manager training, and two-way communication that helps employees understand the “why” behind compensation decisions.
Recently, Alida Newton and Jack Montgomery presented some pay transparency best practices to a group of area business leaders. Inspired by their presentation, this article highlights what employers need to know about posting salary bands in job postings and how it affects the hiring process. So let’s get into it.
It’s Not Just Posting a Number
The Virginia law requires companies to share a good-faith wage or salary range in every posting. But “good faith” is more than just an estimated number.
Setting a range that holds up comes down to three things:
Market data is your anchor point. You’re benchmarking against salary surveys and comp databases to answer the most basic but most important question: are we even in the neighborhood? This isn’t a guess. It should be an analysis of what similar roles pay in Virginia and your industry.
Role value is about your company. Scope, authority, revenue impact, how hard the role is to backfill. It’s what justifies where you land inside that market range. An entry-level coordinator and a senior coordinator might both sit in the “$50-70K market range,” but one lands at $52K and the other at $68K because the actual work is different.
Internal consistency is where the stress often lies, and for good reason! It’s whether the range you’re posting matches what similar roles already pay inside your company. This is the exact issue that resurfaces later as compression. A new hire comes in near the top of the range. A tenured employee in the same role sits below it. Small drifts between someone hired years ago and someone hired today add up over time.
How the Conversation with Applicants Changes
When you post a range, candidates self-select. If someone is looking for $120K and the range is $70-90K, they either don’t apply or they apply knowing the range and already thinking through whether it works for them.
When approaching that first conversation, there are a couple of dos and don’ts to keep in mind
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Approaching a Top-of-the-Range Candidate
When someone’s at the top of the range and asks for more, your instinct might be to ask “what would it take?”
Instead, negotiate on scope or level. Is this genuinely a top-of-range candidate because they bring something exceptional, or are they anchoring high out of habit? Tie it back to the work you did in stage one: the market data, the role value, the internal consistency.
Working with Your Existing Team
If you’ve got team members who might land below a new range you post, don’t wait for them to bring it to you. Use the same range-setting exercise: market data, role value, internal consistency to examine your own internal salary bands. It may be time to have a proactive, honest conversation about where people sit and why (we can help with that!).
Let’s Talk About Your Actual Process
Treat this as a moment to get your compensation strategy in order. At Sandbox, we’ve worked with recruiting leaders through every scenario this creates: compression, negotiations, how to talk to existing team members, and how to build ranges that make sense for your unique organization.
You don’t have to build new systems alone: partner with Sandbox.