Vermont's pay transparency legislation — Act 155 — took effect July 1, 2025, making Vermont one of the most recent states to require compensation disclosure in job advertisements. Vermont is notable for applying to even small employers: businesses with just five or more employees must comply.
Who does Act 155 apply to?
- Employers with five or more employees — one of the lowest thresholds of any state pay transparency law
- Applies to positions performed in Vermont or accessible to Vermont residents
- Vermont employers of all sizes should review their postings — most businesses above five employees will be covered
What must job postings include?
- The compensation range — the minimum and maximum salary, wage rate, or other compensation the employer honestly anticipates paying
- If compensation is fixed (not a range), the fixed amount must be disclosed
Vermont's law does not explicitly require a benefits description, but listing benefits is considered best practice and helps attract qualified candidates.
Employer checklist
- ✓ Include compensation range or fixed amount in every public job posting
- ✓ Apply to all roles, including remote positions accessible to Vermont residents
- ✓ Ensure the range reflects genuine hiring intent — avoid aspirational or artificially wide ranges
- ✓ Brief HR and recruiting teams on the July 2025 effective date requirements
How RoleComply helps
RoleComply added Vermont Act 155 to its scanning engine when the law took effect. Every posting on your careers page is checked for compensation range inclusion, and RoleComply surfaces a fix suggestion if a posting is flagged — so corrections happen before a candidate or regulator notices.
What Vermont employers must do
The Act 155 requires employers to include salary ranges in job postings in Vermont. The Vermont Department of Labor is the authoritative source for compliance guidance and enforcement updates. Employers with any hiring activity in Vermont should treat pay range disclosure as non-negotiable.
Audit every active posting. Review all roles advertised in Vermont — on your own careers page, LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, and through any staffing agencies. Every posting needs a salary range. Check that your range is genuine — regulators and candidates alike can identify placeholder-wide ranges that bear no connection to actual pay.
Establish pay bands. A range on a job posting is only defensible if it connects to a documented compensation structure. Build pay bands for each role or level, benchmark against market data, and document the factors that explain variation within each band (experience, skills, location). This documentation protects you in enforcement situations and in employee conversations.
Train your recruiting team. Front-line recruiters need to understand what is required and what is prohibited. "Competitive salary", "DOE", salary history questions, and ranges that do not match the actual hiring budget are the most common violations — and all of them are preventable with basic training and updated posting templates.
Penalties and enforcement
Enforcement of US pay transparency laws has accelerated since 2023. New York City has issued fines ranging from $15,000 to over $250,000 for single violations. California's Civil Rights Department investigates complaints and requires remediation. The pattern is consistent across jurisdictions: initial enforcement targets large employers with visible non-compliance, then expands to mid-market companies as regulators build capacity. See our US state law roundup for current requirements across all states, or read our salary range best practices guide to learn how to write ranges that satisfy multiple state requirements simultaneously.
Building a future-proof compliance process
Pay transparency is not a one-time project. Laws change, new jurisdictions add requirements, and regulators update their enforcement guidance. The employers who stay compliant without constant firefighting are those who build transparency into their standard recruiting process — not as an add-on, but as a default.
The most effective approach is to treat salary range disclosure as mandatory for every posting, everywhere, regardless of whether the specific jurisdiction currently requires it. This eliminates the need to maintain a compliance matrix by location and ensures you are never caught out by a new law taking effect. It also signals to candidates that transparency is a company value, not a legal minimum.
Pair this with a quarterly posting audit: pull every active job from every platform where you advertise, check for compliance issues, and fix them before candidates or regulators notice. Tools like RoleComply automate this scan, flagging missing ranges, banned phrases, and jurisdiction-specific violations in real time before any posting goes live.
Finally, invest in recruiter training. The people writing and publishing job postings need to understand both what is required today and why the broader shift to transparency is happening. When recruiters understand the strategic rationale — not just the compliance requirement — they become advocates for the process rather than obstacles to it.
For more, read our pay transparency fundamentals guide, explore the job posting compliance audit checklist, or start a free trial of RoleComply to see automated compliance checking on your own job postings.
