Salary Range Transparency & Equal Pay Act Update

On July 24, 2024, H.4890, An Act relative to salary range transparency was passed by the Massachusetts Legislature, and on August 1, 2024, Governor Healey signed the bill into law. 

This bill helps to close the gender and racial wage gap in the Commonwealth by requiring employers with 25 or more employees to disclose a salary range when posting a position and protects an employee's right to ask their employer for the salary range for their position when applying for a job or seeking a promotion.  

This legislation also builds upon the Legislature’s Landmark 2016 Equal Pay Act, of which I was the co-lead House sponsor. The Equal Pay Act prohibits wage discrimination on gender and brought long sought fairness and equality to workplaces in the state.  The 2016 legislation has been copied by many states in the country and has been found to have expedited the narrowing of the wage gap in Massachusetts.

The Legislature built on these provisions by including language from one of my other bills (H.2588, An Act to protect gender pay equity) in H.4890.  The addition of this language ensures that public employees who receive raises pursuant to the Equal Pay Act receive the benefit of those raises in retirement. 

The Public Employee Retirement Administration Commission (PERAC) brought this issue to my attention after the MWRA Retirement Board made them aware of staff who had their salaries adjusted as a result of Equal Pay Act actions, but those increases wold make these employees run afoul of the anti-spiking pension provisions in the General Laws. Intended to deter abusers, the anti-spiking statute capped an employee's regular rate of compensation to 10% of the average earnings in the last 2 years. There were a number of exceptions to the rule including a bona fide promotion or job change or increases due to collective bargaining. However, employees who remain in the same job title with the same responsibilities, but just received a salary increase due to the Equal Pay Act, may not have received the full benefit of the law as their retirement allowance may not fully capture their increases because they could trip the anti-spiking provisions. 

As a result of this information, I filed H.2588, An Act to protect gender pay equity to add salary adjustments resulting from actions related to the Equal Pay Act to the list of exemptions from the anti-spiking statute. The language from my bill was included in H.4890, and was signed into law on August 1, 2025.