California forces companies to show pay on job listings, revealing big tech salaries
- A new law that went into effect this week requires most California employers to disclose salaries on job listings.
- California’s pay transparency law is intended to reduce gender and race pay gaps and help minorities and women compete in the labor market.
- However, the new law doesn’t require employers to post total compensation, or a measure of pay that includes equity, stock options, benefits and bonuses in addition to salary.
A new law that went into effect this week requires most California employers to disclose salaries on job listings.
The law affects every company with more than 15 employees looking to fill a job that could be performed from the state of California. It covers hourly and temporary work, all the way up to openings for highly paid technology executives.
That means it’s now possible to know the salaries top tech companies pay their workers. For example:
- A program manager in Apple’s augmented reality group will receive base pay between $121,000 and $230,000 per year, according to an Apple posting Wednesday.
- A midcareer software engineer at Google Health can expect to make between $126,000 and $190,000 per year.
- A director of software engineering at Meta leading teams building network infrastructure will make at least $253,000 and as much as $327,000 in salary per year.
Notably, these salary listings do not include any bonuses or equity grants, which many tech companies use to attract and retain employees.
California is the latest and biggest of the states and cities that have enacted pay transparency laws, including Colorado and New York City. But more than 20% of Fortune 500 companies are based in California, including leaders in technology and media, and advocates hope that California’s new law will be the tipping point that turns posting salary information into standard practice.
In the U.S., there are now 13 cities and states that require employers to share salary information, covering about 1 in 4 workers, according to Payscale, a software firm focusing on salary comparison.
California’s pay transparency law is intended to reduce gender and race pay gaps and help minorities and women better compete in the labor market. For example, people can compare their current pay with job listings with the same job title and see if they’re being underpaid.
Women earn about 83 cents for every dollar a man earns, according to the U.S. Census.
“You’re going to need a lot of different elements in place in order for men and women to get paid the same for the same amount of work and the same experience,” said Monique Limón, the California state senator who sponsored the new law. “And one of those is transparency around salary ranges.”
But the new disclosures under the law might not tell the whole story of what a job pays. Companies can choose to display wide pay ranges, violating the spirit of the law, and the law doesn’t require companies to reveal bonuses or equity compensation.
The law could also penalize ambitious workers who are gunning for more money because of their experience or skills, the California Chamber of Commerce said last year when opposing the bill. Some employers might be wary of posting pay to prevent bidding wars for top talent.
In a comment to CNBC, a Meta spokesperson said, “To ensure fairness and eliminate bias in our compensation systems, we regularly conduct pay equity analysis, and our latest analysis confirms that we continue to have pay equity across genders globally and by race in the US for people in similar jobs.” The firm also noted that it generally pays full-time employees in equity as well as cash.
Apple and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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