Virginia's pay transparency and salary history law (HB 636 / SB 215) took effect on July 1, and it reaches further than most compliance updates. It touches your job postings, your applications, your interview scripts, your offer process, and one place almost nobody checks: your background screening workflow.
Virginia is the first Southern state to adopt a law like this, joining roughly twenty-five state and local jurisdictions with pay transparency requirements. And it landed on the same day as Virginia's Clean Slate law: two hiring rule changes on one date. Our Virginia Clean Slate guide covers the record-sealing half; this piece covers pay. If you hire in the Commonwealth, here's what the law requires, where the risk really sits, and what to fix first.
What the Law Requires
Two core mandates apply to every employer in Virginia, with no headcount threshold. A five-person shop and a 5,000-person enterprise face the same rules.
Pay ranges in every posting. Each public and internal posting for a job, promotion, transfer, or other employment opportunity must disclose the wage, salary, or a wage or salary range set in good faith. "Competitive salary" and "commensurate with experience" don't satisfy the requirement; the range needs a minimum and a maximum. Under the statute, a good-faith range references at least one of: a formal pay scale, a previously determined range for the role, the actual range paid to people in equivalent positions, or the budgeted amount. Breadth counts too; a range so wide it says nothing can itself fail the good-faith test, so document how each range was set before the posting goes live.
A salary history ban. Employers may not seek a candidate's current or prior pay, whether on the application, in the interview, or through a recruiter, staffing agency, or any other third party, and may not rely on it to consider someone for employment or to set their pay. There is one narrow exception: if a candidate volunteers their salary history unprompted, you may rely on it or confirm it, but only to support a higher offer that doesn't breach equal pay laws. Never to lower one.
The law also protects candidates from retaliation. You can't refuse to interview, hire, or promote someone because they declined to share pay history or asked what the range is.
For the wider Virginia screening picture, see our Virginia compliance guide.
Why Enforcement Here Has Teeth
Virginia adopted a two-track enforcement model that most states don't match.
The Attorney General can bring civil actions, with penalties of up to $1,000 for a first violation and up to $5,000 for each subsequent violation, plus other relief the court finds appropriate.
The bigger exposure is private. Any aggrieved candidate or employee can sue directly within one year of a violation and recover actual damages along with other legal and equitable relief. No agency complaint, no government investigation first. Virginia joins Washington as the only states where job posting violations alone can support a private lawsuit, and Washington's version has already produced a wave of class actions. Our Washington compliance guide covers how that landscape developed.
There is a safety valve, but it's narrow. For posting violations only (a missing pay range, or a range not set in good faith), an employer who corrects the posting on the original platforms within fifteen business days of written notice can't be sued privately over that posting. The cure period does not cover salary history inquiries or retaliation. Ask about prior pay and there's nothing to fix afterwards; the exposure already exists.
Why These Laws Keep Spreading
Salary history bans exist to stop past pay from following workers forever. If someone was underpaid in their last role, and pay gaps by gender and race are well documented, then anchoring the next offer to the last salary carries that gap into every future job. These laws push offers to be based on the role's market value and the candidate's qualifications rather than on whatever someone happened to earn before.
More than twenty states have adopted some version of this in under a decade, and remote hiring spreads the strictest state's rules well beyond its borders. Employers who treat pay transparency as one state's quirk keep getting caught out by the next one; employers who build for it once don't. Virginia won't be the last.
The Hidden Risk: Salary History Leaks Through Verifications
Here's the part most employers miss. Your recruiters can stop asking about pay, your application can be clean, and salary history can still land on your hiring manager's desk, delivered by your own background check.
Traditional employment verifications often include a compensation field. When a screening vendor contacts a previous employer, the standard script can ask for base salary, hourly rate, or bonus history alongside dates and title, and large salary-verification databases return prior pay by default. Some verification workflows go further and ask applicants to submit W-2s or pay stubs as proof of employment. However it arrives, once compensation data sits in a report your hiring team received, it becomes very hard to argue you neither sought nor relied on it.
Multi-state employers carry an outsized version of this risk: one national verification template with a salary field applies to every Virginia candidate in the pipeline.
Four things to check in your screening setup today
- Do your verification forms or scripts include a compensation field?
- Do your reports arrive with W-2s, pay stubs, or compensation statements attached?
- Does your vendor pull from salary-verification databases that return pay data by default?
- Is your workflow adapted for Virginia, or is it one template for all states?
If you don't know the answers, ask your provider. Our overview of employment verification services explains what a verification should and shouldn't return.
Is Your Background Check Company Protecting You and the Applicant? KRESS Does.
We recently ran a test order with a large national screening provider, and what came back is worth sharing.
The client-facing version of the final report included document attachments with salary information fully visible; nothing in the system hid or removed it. The applicant's copy arrived without those attachments, so the applicant never saw what the client saw, which raises real questions about transparency and fairness. And when that provider needed proof of employment via a W-2, the applicant was told to redact the pay details themselves. Many applicants don't know how.
That test is why KRESS works differently.
We keep salary out of your reports. KRESS configures employment verifications so compensation data is excluded, and we no longer attach W-2s or similar pay documents to background check reports. Your team gets what it needs (dates, titles, and tenure) without receiving pay data it can't lawfully use in a growing list of states.
Applicants keep their privacy without doing the work. With DocuProof, our in-house document verification, candidates upload proof of employment or education through a secure link and our team verifies authenticity, with pay details excluded from what reaches you. Nobody has to figure out how to redact their own W-2, and most verifications complete within 24 to 48 hours.
The same report for both sides, salary-silent by design, and a workflow that protects the client and the applicant at once.
What To Do Now
- Audit every active posting, internal and external, and add good-faith pay ranges with documentation of how each was set.
- Strip salary history questions from applications, interview guides, and recruiter scripts, and brief hiring managers that a casual "what were you on before?" now carries real exposure.
- Ask your screening provider, in writing, whether your verifications return compensation data or attach pay documents.
- Set a policy for volunteered pay history: ignore it for the initial offer, and use it only to go higher.
- Update anti-retaliation policies to cover candidates who decline to share pay history or ask about a range.
- Build a cure protocol with a single point of intake, so a written notice about a posting is corrected on the original platforms inside fifteen business days.
The postings are the visible part. The background check workflow is where violations hide.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Virginia's pay transparency law already in effect?
Yes. It took effect on July 1, 2026, with no phase-in period, and applies to every employer in Virginia regardless of size.
Can I use salary history if a candidate volunteers it?
Only to support a higher offer that stays within equal pay laws. It can't be used to lower an offer or to justify paying below the posted range. The cleanest approach: make the offer from the posted range and the candidate's qualifications, then adjust upward if volunteered history supports it.
Can a background check include salary history in Virginia?
It shouldn't. A verification that returns compensation data or attaches a W-2 can amount to seeking salary history. Ask your screening provider to exclude salary fields and stop attaching pay documents; KRESS already configures reports this way.
What are the penalties?
Attorney General civil penalties of up to $1,000 for a first violation and up to $5,000 for each subsequent one, plus a private right of action: candidates and employees can sue within one year for actual damages and other relief.
Is there a grace period to fix mistakes?
Only for postings. Correct a flagged posting on the original platforms within fifteen business days of written notice and that posting can't support a private suit. There's no cure for salary history inquiries or retaliation.
You've got enough on your plate without auditing every verification report for stray salary data. Get a quote and we'll review your screening setup, flag where compensation data could leak into your Virginia hires, and configure your verifications to be salary-silent.