Virginia Remote Job Postings: Pay Ranges and Pay History

Do remote job postings in Virginia now need to show pay ranges and stop asking about pay history

Yes. Virginia’s pay transparency and salary history law took effect on July 1, 2026, and it requires a wage or salary range in job postings while also prohibiting employers from seeking a candidate’s wage or salary history. The practical mistake is assuming remote work creates an exception. It does not.

The law is written broadly. It applies to each public and internal posting for each job, promotion, transfer, or other employment opportunity, and the Code of Virginia defines the required range as the minimum and maximum wage or salary for the position, set in good faith. If a posting is for a Virginia job, the posting needs the range.

That is the part people get wrong: a remote listing still counts if it is a Virginia position or a posting by an employer covered by the Virginia rule. The employer cannot avoid the range requirement by labeling the job remote, and the employer cannot ask the applicant for pay history as part of screening, interviewing, or compensation setting.

Virginia’s Department of Labor and Industry says employers should review public-facing and internal postings, remove pay history questions from applications, and update interview guides. That guidance matters because the law is not just about the job ad itself. Hidden questions in an application form, recruiter script, or intake note can create the same problem as a visible pay-history field.

The inconvenient part is timing. A range has to be ready before the posting goes live, not patched in later after candidates ask. If a recruiter posts first and cleans up later, the employer has already created a noncompliant posting. The safer workflow is to set the range in good faith, put it in the posting, and keep the application form free of salary-history prompts.

The law also leaves one narrow opening: if a prospective employee voluntarily provides wage or salary history without the employer prompting, the employer may use that history only within the limits written into the statute. That is not a license to ask. It is a narrow exception for unsolicited information that the candidate brings up on their own.

For job seekers, the rule is simple. You should see a wage or salary range in the posting, and you should not be asked what you made before. If an application still asks for salary history, that is a warning sign that the employer has not updated its hiring process for the Virginia rule.

For employers, the work is operational. Update the posting template, the application form, the recruiter intake checklist, and the interview script. A compliant remote posting does not need a perfect range, but it does need a range set in good faith. A missing range is not fixed by saying the role is remote.

If you are checking a real posting, look for three things: the salary range in the ad, no salary-history field in the application, and no interview question that asks what the candidate earned before. DevConnect keeps a live tracker for closed-test planning at https://devconnectplatform.com, but the Virginia issue is separate: this is a hiring compliance rule, not a product launch rule.

If a company posts across multiple states, the question becomes which jobs are covered by Virginia law and where the worker is being hired into the role. Employers should have counsel or HR review edge cases, especially for national remote teams. The common mistake is to assume one generic U.S. template works everywhere. It does not.

Bottom line: yes, Virginia now requires pay ranges in covered job postings and bars pay-history questions. Remote jobs are not a free pass, and the safest assumption is to treat a Virginia-covered remote role the same way you would treat any other covered Virginia posting.

What to do next

If you are an employer, fix the posting template first, then the application and interview flow. If you are a candidate, save a screenshot of the posting and note whether the range is present and whether pay history is requested. If the employer later changes the form, the original posting still matters.

Where the rule comes from

Virginia’s Code and the Department of Labor and Industry’s July 2026 update both say the state now requires salary-range disclosure and bans seeking wage history in hiring. University HR guidance in Virginia is already reflecting the same rule for campus employers, which is a good sign that the change is being treated as live and operational, not theoretical.