Pay Transparency Requirements for
Colorado-Based Employees

Here is a scenario we see more often than you would think. An Oklahoma company hires a talented software developer who happens to live in Denver. The work is fully remote. Payroll is set up, the developer starts, and nobody thinks twice about it. Nine months later the company posts three new openings on its careers page with no salary information, because that is how it has always posted jobs.

That company just exposed itself to penalties under one of the strictest pay transparency laws in the country, and it has no idea. The Colorado Equal Pay for Equal Work Act does not care where your headquarters sits. It cares whether you employ someone in Colorado.

We have hired people ourselves, in more than one business, before we ever practiced law. We know that job postings are the last thing a growing company thinks about from a legal standpoint. They feel like marketing, not compliance. In Colorado they are compliance, and each noncompliant posting is its own violation with its own fine. This guide walks through exactly what the law requires, who it actually covers, and the traps that catch out of state employers.

Table of Contents

• Who Is Actually Covered by the Law
• What Every Job Posting Must Include
• The Job Opportunity Notice Requirement
• Post Selection Notices: The Step Employers Forget
• The Career Progression Exception
• Salary History Ban and Pay Discussion Rights
• Recordkeeping Obligations
• Penalties and How Enforcement Works
• The Remote Work Trap for Out of State Employers
• What This Means for Oklahoma Businesses
• Your Compliance Checklist
• When to Get Legal Help

Who Is Actually Covered by the Law

Start here, because this is where most companies get the analysis wrong. They assume a Colorado employment law applies to Colorado companies. It does not work that way.

The Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, found at C.R.S. section 8-5-101 and following, took effect January 1, 2021, and was significantly amended effective January 1, 2024. The statute defines an employer broadly: the state, its political subdivisions, and every other person employing a person in the state. The Colorado Division of Labor Standards and Statistics reads that plainly. According to the Division’s official guidance, the Act covers all employers, public or private, that employ at least one person in Colorado.

One person. Not fifteen, not fifty. There is no employee count threshold and no revenue threshold. If a single member of your team lives and works in Colorado, you are a covered employer for purposes of the posting and notice rules. The Division publishes a short fact sheet summarizing the Act if you want the one page version to circulate internally.

The flip side is equally clear and worth knowing: if an employer has no employees in Colorado at the time of its hiring decision, it does not need to comply. The obligation attaches to having a Colorado worker, not to advertising into Colorado generally.

Remote Postings Count

This is the piece that surprises people most. The requirements reach not only jobs physically performed in Colorado but also jobs that could potentially be performed from Colorado. A posting for a fully remote position that says “work from anywhere in the United States” is a posting a Colorado resident could fill, and it is treated accordingly.

Some employers have tried to sidestep this by adding language excluding Colorado applicants. That approach carries its own reputational and legal risk, has drawn scrutiny, and generally is not a strategy we recommend to clients who actually want to hire the best available talent. It also tends to be a short term fix for a problem that is spreading, since more states adopt similar rules every year.

What Every Job Posting Must Include

Once you are covered, every posting for a covered role, whether it is external on a job board or internal on your intranet, has to carry specific information. The Division’s Interpretive Notice and Formal Opinion number 9A sets out the expectations in detail. Under INFO number 9A, all job postings and notices must disclose the pay rate or range, a general description of any other compensation such as bonuses and commissions, a general description of benefits, and when and how to apply.

Break that into its four components.

1. The Pay Rate or Range

You must state either the actual compensation or a good faith range for the position. A range is acceptable, but it needs to be a real one. Posting a range of $40,000 to $400,000 to technically satisfy the rule invites a complaint and undercuts the entire purpose of the requirement.

There is a wrinkle for multistate employers worth flagging. INFO number 9A clarifies that if compensation would vary by state, the range disclosed must reflect the Colorado information, including any applicable local minimum wage requirements. Colorado has local minimum wages above the state figure in some jurisdictions, Denver most notably, so a national range built around a lower cost market may not work as posted.

2. A General Description of Other Compensation

Bonuses, commissions, tips, equity, profit sharing, and similar items belong here. You do not need to publish your entire compensation plan, but you do need to tell an applicant that these forms of pay exist and give a general sense of them.

3. A General Description of Benefits

Health insurance, retirement plans, paid time off, and other major benefits need a general description. Again, general is the operative word. A short summary satisfies the rule.

4. When and How to Apply

The posting must tell candidates how to apply and include the application deadline or closing date. This element is frequently omitted by companies that otherwise did the compensation disclosure correctly, and it is an independent requirement.

The Job Opportunity Notice Requirement

External postings are only half of the framework. The second half concerns your existing employees, and it is where the compliance work gets genuinely operational.

Under the statute, an employer must make reasonable efforts to announce, post, or otherwise make known each job opportunity to all employees on the same calendar day and before the date on which the employer makes a selection decision. The purpose is to give current employees a fair shot at internal advancement rather than learning about an opening after it has been filled.

Two details drive most of the mistakes here.

Same calendar day. Notice needs to go to all employees at once. You cannot roll it out to one department this week and another next week. INFO number 9A does clarify that there is no prohibition on approaching a specific individual in advance, for instance to gauge whether someone would even be interested in a promotion, before the general notice goes out. But the general notice itself has to be simultaneous.

Before the selection decision. A notice sent after you have already picked your candidate does not satisfy the rule. The notice has to precede the decision so employees have a real opportunity to express interest.

The notice must also include the same compensation and benefits information required in a posting when the opportunity is one that could be performed in Colorado.

Limited Exemptions

The Division has recognized narrow carve outs. Acting, interim, or temporary positions that require an immediate hire are exempt from the job opportunity notice requirement, as are confidential replacements, meaning situations where an employer is quietly replacing someone who does not yet know they are being replaced. These exemptions are narrow and fact specific. Do not treat them as general purpose escape hatches.

Post Selection Notices: The Step Employers Forget

The 2024 amendments added a requirement that catches almost every employer new to the law. Senate Bill 23-105, signed in June 2023 and effective January 1, 2024, requires employers to notify the colleagues of each new hire or promotion about who was selected and how to express interest in similar opportunities in the future.

In plain terms: after you fill a role, you have to tell the relevant employees who got it.

The Division has not mandated a specific form, but INFO number 9A offers a simple example of a compliant post selection notice along the lines of announcing that a named employee has been promoted from one role to the next. It does not need to be elaborate. It does need to happen, and it needs to include information about how employees can demonstrate interest in similar roles going forward.

The Career Progression Exception

Employers pushed back on the original law with a fair objection. If an engineer automatically moves from Engineer I to Engineer II after ninety days and a certification, with no new position created and no vacancy filled, does the company really need to run a company wide notice process?

The amendments responded by excluding career developments and career progressions from the notice obligation. A career development refers to a role change that reflects an employee’s existing contributions rather than a new or vacant position. In exchange, employers must disclose to eligible employees how to advance through the career progressions that are available to them.

Be careful with this exception, because it is narrower than it first appears. The Division’s guidance indicates that any subjectivity in the promotional decision will disqualify a promotion from qualifying as a career progression. If a manager exercises discretion about who advances and when, you are outside the exception and back into full notice obligations. The exception is designed for genuinely automatic, criteria based advancement, not for discretionary promotions that happen to be routine.

Salary History Ban and Pay Discussion Rights

Part one of the Act, distinct from the transparency provisions, carries obligations that reach into your entire hiring process.

You Cannot Ask About Pay History

Colorado prohibits employers from seeking a prospective employee’s wage rate history, relying on wage history to set a wage rate, or discriminating or retaliating against an applicant who declines to disclose it. Requiring disclosure of prior pay as a condition of employment is also prohibited.

Importantly, the law does not stop you from asking about salary expectations for the role. That distinction matters practically. “What are you looking for in this position?” is a permissible question. “What are you making now?” is not. If your application forms, screening scripts, or recruiter intake templates still ask the second question, they need to be revised, and that includes forms used by any third party recruiters working on your behalf.

Employees Can Discuss Their Pay

The Act prohibits employers from preventing employees from discussing their own compensation with others, and from requiring employees to sign a waiver or document purporting to bar such discussions. Any such agreement is unenforceable.

This overlaps with longstanding federal law under the National Labor Relations Act, but with a meaningful difference: the federal protection generally does not extend to management level employees, while the Colorado provision is broader. If your employee handbook, offer letters, or confidentiality agreements contain pay secrecy language, that language is a liability. We see it in template documents constantly, usually inherited from a form agreement nobody has reviewed in years.

Related Screening Restrictions

Colorado layers several other hiring restrictions on top of the Act, which the Division groups together in its guidance. The Job Application Fairness Act, effective July 1, 2024, restricts employers from asking about age related information on initial job applications, with limited exceptions where age requirements are based on legal or safety needs. That means no birth date, no graduation dates, no age proxies on the initial application. There are also separate rules governing criminal history screening, credit history, and access to personal social media.

Recordkeeping Obligations

The Act requires covered employers to preserve records of wages and job descriptions for each employee. This sounds like housekeeping until you understand how it interacts with litigation.

If an employee sues and demonstrates a violation, a court may order appropriate relief that includes a rebuttable presumption that records the employer failed to keep contained information favorable to the employee’s claim. In other words, missing records do not create a neutral evidentiary gap. They can be construed against you.

Note also that the 2023 amendments extended the recovery period for wage discrimination claims from three years to six years, which means the records that matter reach further back than most companies assume.

Penalties and How Enforcement Works

The financial exposure here is real, and it scales with hiring volume rather than company size.

Under the statute, upon finding that an employer has violated the transparency provisions, the director may order the employer to pay a fine of no less than five hundred dollars and no more than ten thousand dollars per violation.

The critical word is “per violation.” Each noncompliant job posting is a separate violation, and each failure to provide a required job opportunity notice is a separate violation. For counting purposes, failing to include required information in postings for one job opening counts as one violation regardless of how many places the job was advertised, which is a small mercy. But a company running twenty noncompliant postings is looking at twenty violations, not one.

How Complaints Start

Enforcement is complaint driven, and the barrier to filing is low. Individuals may file written complaints with the Division regarding pay transparency violations, and complaints may be submitted anonymously. The Division’s own complaint form states plainly that a person may submit a complaint anonymously by skipping the identifying section.

Think about what that means operationally. A rejected applicant, a competitor, an advocacy organization, or a current employee who noticed a posting with no salary range can file without identifying themselves. You will not necessarily see it coming from a disgruntled employee you already knew about.

Enforcement is active rather than theoretical. Public reporting on Division activity indicates the agency had received well over a thousand complaints and assessed fines in the hundreds of thousands of dollars within the first few years of the law’s operation. The Division also created a mandatory mediation process for pay transparency complaints effective July 1, 2024.

Private Lawsuits Are Separate

Administrative fines are not the only exposure. An employee harmed by a transparency violation, for example someone who missed out on an internal opportunity because they were never notified, may pursue civil remedies including actual damages such as lost wages and benefits. Pay discrimination claims under part one of the Act carry their own remedies including back pay and liquidated damages, and retaliation claims add another layer.

The Remote Work Trap for Out of State Employers

Now the part that matters most to companies headquartered outside Colorado, and the part that is most often misunderstood.

The 2023 amendments did create relief for small out of state employers, but the relief is narrower than the summaries suggest. Under the amended statute, if an employer is only physically located outside of Colorado and has fewer than fifteen employees working in Colorado, all of whom work only remotely, then through July 1, 2029, the employer is only required to provide notice of remote job opportunities rather than all promotional opportunities company wide.

Read that carefully, because three conditions all have to be true:

• You have no physical location in Colorado
• You have fewer than fifteen Colorado employees
• Every one of those Colorado employees works only remotely

And note precisely what the relief covers. It narrows the scope of the job opportunity notice obligation, so that you only have to notify your Colorado employees about remote opportunities rather than every promotional opening across your company. It is a limited exemption with a 2029 sunset.

The practical failure mode we see is a company that grows past the assumptions it started with. You hire one remote person in Colorado, then a second, then you open a small satellite office or bring on a Colorado based salesperson who works partly from client sites rather than only remotely. Any of those changes can move you out of the narrow relief without anyone noticing, because nobody is monitoring the trigger.

What This Means for Oklahoma Businesses

Oklahoma has no pay transparency law. There is no state requirement that you publish a salary range, no job opportunity notice mandate, no post selection notice obligation, and no state salary history ban. An Oklahoma employer hiring exclusively into Oklahoma roles can post a job with nothing but a title and a description and be entirely compliant with state law.

That gap is exactly what makes this dangerous. Oklahoma companies have no habit of building compensation disclosure into their hiring process, because nothing here has ever required it. When those same companies hire remotely, the habits travel with them and the legal obligations do not.

Three Ways Oklahoma Companies Get Caught

The remote hire nobody flagged. Your best candidate for a remote role lives in Colorado Springs. You hire them. Nobody in the organization connects that hire to a change in your posting obligations, and your careers page keeps running the way it always has.

The energy and construction crossover. Oklahoma energy services, engineering, and construction firms frequently work projects across the Rockies. A project manager or field employee based in Colorado can create the same coverage question, and these arrangements often start informally.

Expansion without an employment audit. An Oklahoma company decides to open a Denver office, handles the entity registration correctly, and never revisits its hiring documents. Foreign qualification is a real step and worth doing right, and the Colorado Secretary of State explains the Statement of Foreign Entity Authority process for out of state entities transacting business there. But entity registration is the easy part. The employment framework is where the compliance work actually lives.

The Rest of the Colorado Employment Framework

If pay transparency is on your radar because of a Colorado hire, understand that it does not travel alone. Colorado runs one of the most prescriptive employment law frameworks in the country and it changes nearly every January 1. An Oklahoma employer with Colorado workers should also be looking at:

• Restrictive covenants. Colorado sharply limits non competes under House Bill 22-1317, with annually adjusted compensation thresholds and a separate written notice requirement. A non compete that is perfectly enforceable in Oklahoma may be void in Colorado, and the penalties for getting it wrong are significant.
• Wage and hour rules. Colorado’s minimum wage, overtime, and exempt salary thresholds are set by the state COMPS Order and sit above federal levels. The Division maintains current guidance on wage and hour requirements including paid leave.
• Paid family leave. Colorado’s family and medical leave insurance program involves employer and employee premium contributions and covers Colorado based workers.
• Artificial intelligence in hiring. Colorado’s AI legislation, originally enacted as Senate Bill 24-205, has been amended and delayed more than once, most recently replaced by a narrower disclosure focused framework. If you use automated tools to screen applicants, this belongs on your watch list alongside our guide to AI compliance for business owners.

We are licensed in Oklahoma, Colorado, and Wyoming, which means we spend a fair amount of time helping companies navigate exactly this gap between a relaxed home state framework and a demanding one next door. Our labor and employment practice handles the hiring documents, and our business formation practice handles the registration side when companies expand across state lines.

Your Compliance Checklist

If you employ anyone in Colorado, or expect to, work through this list. Most of it is a one time cleanup followed by a process change.

When to Get Legal Help

Some of this you can handle internally. Adding a salary range to a posting template does not require counsel. Other pieces genuinely warrant a legal review, particularly where the answer depends on facts specific to your company.

Bring in an attorney when you are making your first hire in Colorado or any other state with transparency requirements, when you are unsure whether the small out of state employer relief actually applies to your situation, when you are deciding whether a promotion qualifies as a career progression, when you are revising employee handbooks or offer letters that may contain pay secrecy or salary history language, or when you have received a complaint or an inquiry from the Division.

That last one deserves emphasis. A complaint is not the moment to start figuring out what the law requires. Because enforcement can begin with an anonymous filing, the first notice you receive may already be an active matter. The companies that come through these cleanly are the ones that documented their process before anyone asked.

The Division publishes its guidance, forms, and current rules at ColoradoLaborLaw.gov, and it is a genuinely useful resource for employers who want to understand the baseline before a conversation with counsel.

Frequently Asked Questions

• Does Colorado’s pay transparency law apply if my company is based in Oklahoma?

  Yes, if you employ at least one person who works in Colorado. The law covers all employers, public or private, that employ at least one person in the state, with no employee count or revenue threshold. Where your headquarters sits does not matter. If you have no employees in Colorado at the time of your hiring decision, the posting and notice requirements do not apply to you.

• What exactly has to appear in a job posting?

  Four things: the pay rate or a good faith range, a general description of other compensation such as bonuses and commissions, a general description of benefits, and information on how and when to apply including the application deadline. A posting that includes a salary range but omits the other three elements is still noncompliant.

• Do I have to include pay information on remote job postings?

  Yes, if you are a covered employer and the role could be performed from Colorado. A posting advertising remote work anywhere in the country is a posting a Colorado resident could fill, so it falls within the requirements. This is the single most common way out of state employers end up out of compliance.

• What is the penalty for a noncompliant job posting?

  The director may order a fine of no less than $500 and no more than $10,000 per violation. Each noncompliant posting and each missed job opportunity notice counts separately, though posting the same job in multiple places counts as one violation. Fines are separate from any damages an employee might recover in a private lawsuit.

• I only have a couple of remote employees in Colorado. Am I exempt?

  Only partially, and only if you meet all three conditions: no physical location in Colorado, fewer than fifteen Colorado employees, and all of them working only remotely. If you qualify, then through July 1, 2029 you only need to notify your Colorado employees about remote job opportunities rather than every company wide promotional opening. It does not exempt you from the job posting disclosure requirements.

• Can I still ask candidates about their current salary?

  No. Colorado prohibits seeking an applicant’s wage history, relying on it to set pay, or retaliating against someone who will not disclose it. You may ask about salary expectations for the role, which is a different question. Make sure any outside recruiters working for you follow the same rule.

• Can I stop employees from discussing their pay with each other?

  No. Colorado prohibits employers from preventing employees from discussing their own compensation and from requiring them to sign any waiver to that effect, and such agreements are unenforceable. Colorado’s protection is broader than the comparable federal protection, which generally does not extend to management level employees. Check your handbook and offer letters for legacy pay secrecy language.

• Does an automatic promotion require a company wide notice?

  Not if it genuinely qualifies as a career progression, meaning advancement based on defined criteria rather than a new or vacant position. But the exception is narrow. Guidance indicates that subjectivity in the promotional decision disqualifies it, so discretionary promotions remain subject to the full notice requirements. If a manager decides who advances and when, assume you need to give notice.

• How would the state even find out about a noncompliant posting?

  Complaints can be filed anonymously with the Division, and job postings are public by nature. A rejected applicant, a current employee, or an outside observer can file without identifying themselves. Enforcement has been active, with the Division receiving well over a thousand complaints and assessing substantial fines since the law took effect.

Disclaimer: This article provides general information about Colorado’s pay transparency requirements and should not be considered legal advice. Colorado employment law changes frequently, often effective each January 1, and thresholds, rules, and agency guidance cited here may change after publication. Whether and how these requirements apply depends on facts specific to your business. For guidance on your situation, consult qualified employment counsel licensed in the applicable state.

About Cantrell Law Firm: We are business attorneys and former entrepreneurs licensed in Oklahoma, Colorado, and Wyoming. We help growing companies handle hiring, contracts, expansion, and compliance across state lines with practical advice grounded in real operating experience. Contact us to discuss your multistate hiring and employment needs.