With New Pay Transparency Law, Cleveland Businesses Have to Be Clear About Salaries in Job Postings

City Council passed legislation Monday requiring all Cleveland-area employers with more than 15 employees to be totally clear about what pay to expect for jobseekers. Credit: Mark Oprea

Cleveland companies can no longer get away with being vague on job posting sites as far as salary goes.

That is: citing “competitive compensation,” “weekly pay” or “getting paid tomorrow” will no longer cut it.

And starting in six months, it’s illegal. City Council passed a suite of laws Monday that require, by law, all employers with over 15 workers to list, on any kind of job advertisement, the salary range one can expect to get if they’re hired.

Also, employers can no longer legally ask you what you make at your current job or any past role, or hire you (or not hire you) based on what they find out about your past pay. (Even if that’s somehow included, inadvertently, in a background check.)

That suite of laws backing pay transparency, as pushed by council members Charles Slife and Stephanie Howse-Jones, represent a year’s worth of advocacy from the Cleveland Pay Equity Alliance.

The Alliance—including both the Northeast Ohio Worker Center and Collaborate Cleveland—lobbied Council and local nonprofits to back laws that would help ensure people are paid what they’re job’s actually worth; not what their past salaries determine.

“That’s the way people get stagnated in low-wage work,” Grace Heffernan, the executive director of the NEOWC, told Scene.

“It’s also the way that inequality builds over time,” she added. “If at your first job you were underpaid, when you go into your next job and they ask you about what you made at your previous employer, you’re having to already start from behind.”

That upfront transparency, attaching a firm salary range per year to that kitchen work or IT job, will better ensure those who are most abused by shifty pay decisions—women, minorities—are given the same salaries as any other applicant, Heffernan said. Just as not bringing up past pay will.

It’s this reason why, Heffernan said, the laws passed Monday make Cleveland’s “actually the most progressive legislation in the state.”

Similar laws were passed in Columbus in 2024 and Toledo in 2019. But Columbus doesn’t require salaries to be clear on job postings. And Toledo only requires employers to be upfront about such pay range only after the job’s been offered.

Cleveland’s law are actually closer to those passed seven years ago in both California and Washington, where any infringements of the posting and hush-hush laws mean reprimanding by some kind of enforcement board.

Here, that’s the Fair Employment Wage Board, which, starting in May, will be getting the word out to employers (over the next year, most likely) and receiving complaints from jobseekers about employers that are still, for whatever reason, keeping salaries a secret.

And if, after a complaint is made, that business doesn’t change their ad? They could be ordered to pay the city anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000, depending on how many violations they’ve had in the past five years.

Heffernan, who worked with Collaborate Cleveland Director Abby Westbrook and a coalition of 40 pushing this to Council, said the impact of the new laws won’t be earth-shattering, or force every hospital or restaurant to be 100 percent clear on what incoming workers will make.

But it will help. A year after they passed their own laws, Colorado tightened its wage gap by seven percent, specifically with married women over 35.

“This is not a silver bullet,” Heffernan. “This is not a panacea to wealth inequality. We know that is a multifaceted, systemic issue. This is just one tool that municipal government has in their toolbox for fighting the gender and racial wage gap.”