Minnesota Bans the Salary-History Question and Requires a Pay Range in the Posting — but the Two Rules Sit in Different Chapters and Only One of Them Names a Remedy

Three statutes, and they do not line up

Minnesota’s pay-transparency rules are usually written about as one thing. They are three, in two chapters, with different coverage, different effective dates, and — this is the part that matters most — different enforcement.

• The salary-history ban is Minn. Stat. § 363A.08, subd. 8, inside the Minnesota Human Rights Act.
• The pay-range-in-postings requirement is Minn. Stat. § 181.173, inside chapter 181.
• The right to talk about your own pay is Minn. Stat. § 181.172, older than both and the only one of the three with an anti-retaliation clause written into it.

The salary-history ban

Subdivision 8 opens with its own definition. Paragraph (a): “‘Pay history’ as used in this subdivision means any prior or current wage, salary, earnings, benefits, or any other compensation about an applicant for employment.” Note “prior or current,” and note “any other compensation” — the definition is not limited to base salary.

The prohibition is paragraph (b):

An employer, employment agency, or labor organization shall not inquire into, consider, or require disclosure from any source the pay history of an applicant for employment for the purpose of determining wages, salary, earnings, benefits, or other compensation for that applicant. The general prohibition against inquiring into the pay history of an applicant does not apply if the job applicant’s pay history is a matter of public record under federal or state law, unless the employer, employment agency, or labor organization sought access to those public records with the intent of obtaining pay history of the applicant for the purpose of determining wages, salary, earnings, benefits, or other compensation for that applicant.

Three prohibited acts, not one: inquiring, considering, and requiring disclosure. “[F]rom any source” removes the workaround of asking a prior employer instead of the applicant. And the limit on the prohibition is a purpose limit — the acts are prohibited when done “for the purpose of determining” the applicant’s compensation.

The public-record exception has a hook in its own tail. It applies where the pay history “is a matter of public record under federal or state law,” which is the ordinary situation for a public employee, but it withdraws itself where the employer “sought access to those public records with the intent of obtaining pay history of the applicant” for the compensation-setting purpose.

Paragraph (c) handles the applicant who volunteers. Nothing in the subdivision prevents an applicant “from voluntarily and without asking, encouraging, or prompting disclosing pay history for the purposes of negotiating wages, salary, benefits, or other compensation,” and where that happens, nothing prohibits the employer from “considering or acting on that voluntarily disclosed salary history information to support a wage or salary higher than initially offered by the employer, employment agency, or labor organization.” The permitted use runs in one direction — to support a higher figure.

Paragraph (e) preserves two ordinary employer practices: “providing information about the wages, benefits, compensation, or salary offered in relation to a position,” and “inquiring about or otherwise engaging in discussions with an applicant about the applicant’s expectations or requests with respect to wages, salary, benefits, or other compensation.” What you want is a different question from what you were paid, and the statute keeps them apart.

Paragraph (d) preserves other claims: nothing in the subdivision “limits, prohibits, or prevents a person from bringing a charge, grievance, or any other cause of action alleging wage discrimination” on the protected grounds “as otherwise provided in this chapter.”

Who the salary-history ban reaches, and from when

The Human Rights Act’s definition of “employer” is one line. Minn. Stat. § 363A.03, subd. 16: “‘Employer’ means a person who has one or more employees.” There is no headcount threshold to clear.

The enacting act sets the date and carries a delay clause most summaries drop. Subdivision 8 was added by Laws 2023, ch. 52, art. 19, § 56, and that section ends: “This section is effective January 1, 2024. For employment covered by collective bargaining agreements, this section is not effective until the date of implementation of the applicable collective bargaining agreement that is after January 1, 2024.”

How the salary-history ban is enforced

Through the Human Rights Act’s ordinary machinery, not through a remedy inside subdivision 8. Minn. Stat. § 363A.28, subd. 1, opens both doors: “Any person aggrieved by a violation of this chapter may bring a civil action as provided in section 363A.33, subdivision 1, or may file a verified charge with the commissioner or the commissioner’s designated agent.” Section 363A.33, subd. 1, is the civil-action route — “The commissioner or a person may bring a civil action seeking redress for an unfair discriminatory practice directly to district court.”

The clock is the Act’s clock, and it is short. Section 363A.28, subd. 3(a): a claim “must be brought as a civil action pursuant to section 363A.33, subdivision 1, filed in a charge with a local commission pursuant to section 363A.07, subdivision 3, or filed in a charge with the commissioner within one year after the occurrence of the practice.” Paragraph (b) suspends the running of that year while a potential charging party and respondent are voluntarily engaged in a dispute-resolution process, with a notice obligation on the respondent and a consequence for failing it.

Retaliation for objecting is handled by a separate section. Minn. Stat. § 363A.15 makes it an unfair discriminatory practice to “intentionally engage in any reprisal” against a person because that person “opposed a practice forbidden under this chapter or has filed a charge, testified, assisted, or participated in any manner in an investigation, proceeding, or hearing under this chapter.” The section then supplies its own examples for the employment setting — refusing to hire the individual, departing “from any customary employment practice,” transferring or assigning the individual “to a lesser position in terms of wages, hours, job classification, job security, or other employment status,” or informing another employer of the protected activity. Note the word “intentionally,” which § 363A.08, subd. 8, does not use.

The rest of the charge process, including what the Department of Human Rights does with a charge, is walked through in the MDHR charge, step by step, and the one-year period sits with the rest of the Act’s deadlines in discrimination claims are lost on the calendar.

The pay range in the posting

Section 181.173 is short enough to read whole, and its coverage is where it differs most from the salary-history ban. Subdivision 1(b):

“Employer” means a person or entity that employs 30 or more employees at one or more sites in Minnesota and includes an individual, corporation, partnership, association, nonprofit organization, group of persons, state, county, town, city, school district, or other governmental subdivision.

Thirty employees, and the count is written two ways at once: it aggregates across sites, and the employees counted are employees “in Minnesota.” Public employers are named in the definition — state, county, town, city, school district, and other governmental subdivisions.

“Posting” is defined broadly in subdivision 1(c): “any solicitation intended to recruit job applicants for a specific available position, including recruitment done directly by an employer or indirectly through a third party, and includes any postings made electronically or via printed hard copy, that includes qualifications for desired applicants.” A recruiter’s listing is inside. So is a printed one.

“Salary range” is defined in subdivision 1(d) as “the minimum and maximum annual salary or hourly range of compensation, based on the employer’s good faith estimate, for a job opportunity of the employer at the time of the posting of an advertisement for such opportunity.”

The requirement itself is subdivision 2:

(a) An employer must disclose in each posting for each job opening with the employer the starting salary range, and a general description of all of the benefits and other compensation, including but not limited to any health or retirement benefits, to be offered to a hired job applicant.

(b) An employer that does not plan to offer a salary range for a position must list a fixed pay rate. A salary range may not be open ended.

Two obligations, not one. The range is the first; “a general description of all of the benefits and other compensation” is the second, and it is the one most postings skip. Paragraph (b) closes the obvious evasion in a single sentence.

Section 181.173 was enacted by Laws 2024, ch. 110, art. 7, § 2, and that section carries its own effective-date clause: “This section is effective January 1, 2025.”

What § 181.173 does not carry

The section has two subdivisions. Neither creates a penalty, names an agency, or authorizes a lawsuit, and the page will not invent one.

Three enumerations were checked, one at a time, against the statutes that carry Minnesota’s employment-standards remedies:

• Minn. Stat. § 177.27, subd. 4 lists the sections for which the commissioner of labor and industry “may issue an order requiring an employer to comply.” The list names §§ 177.21 to 177.435, 177.50, 179.86, 181.02, 181.03, 181.031, 181.032, 181.10, 181.101, 181.11, 181.13, 181.14, 181.145, 181.15, 181.165, “181.172, paragraph (a) or (d),” 181.214 to 181.217, 181.275, subd. 2a, 181.635, 181.64, 181.722, 181.723, 181.79, 181.85 to 181.89, 181.939 to 181.943, 181.9445 to 181.9448, 181.987, 181.991, 268B.09, subds. 1 to 6, and 268B.14, subd. 3. Section 181.173 is not in it.
• Minn. Stat. § 181.171, subd. 1 lists the sections a person may take “directly to district court”: §§ 181.02, 181.03, 181.031, 181.032, 181.08, 181.09, 181.10, 181.101, 181.11, 181.13, 181.14, 181.145, 181.15, 181.722, and 181.723. Section 181.173 is not in it.
• Minn. Stat. § 181.944 gives a private action to “a person injured by a violation of sections 181.172, paragraph (a) or (d), 181.939 to 181.943, and 181.9445 to 181.9448.” Section 181.173 is not in it.

A search of the revisor’s full-chapter text of chapter 181 and of chapter 177 for the string “181.173” returns the section’s own headnote and its line in chapter 181’s table of sections, and nothing else.

One section does reach it by its terms. Minn. Stat. § 181.1721 is a single sentence: “In addition to the enforcement of this chapter by the department, the attorney general may enforce this chapter under section 8.31.” Section 181.173 is part of chapter 181, so the attorney general’s enforcement authority reaches it on the face of § 181.1721. Whether the private remedy in § 8.31, subd. 3a — which runs to “any person injured by a violation of any of the laws referred to in subdivision 1” — also reaches a chapter 181 violation is a further question, because § 8.31, subd. 1, names a list of acts that does not include chapter 181 while also describing, in general terms, “the law of this state respecting unfair, discriminatory, and other unlawful practices in business, commerce, or trade.” This page does not answer that question.

The oldest of the three, and the one with teeth against retaliation

Section 181.172 has been on the books since 2014 and does something the other two do not: it protects the employee who talks. Paragraph (a):

An employer shall not:

(1) require nondisclosure by an employee of his or her wages as a condition of employment;

(2) require an employee to sign a waiver or other document which purports to deny an employee the right to disclose the employee’s wages; or

(3) take any adverse employment action against an employee for disclosing the employee’s own wages or discussing another employee’s wages which have been disclosed voluntarily.

Clause (3) is narrower than it is usually described. It protects disclosing your own wages without qualification, and it protects discussing another employee’s wages only where those have been “disclosed voluntarily.”

Paragraph (b) states four things the section does not do, and the first is a real limit: it does not “create an obligation on any employer or employee to disclose wages.” The section is a protection, not a transparency mandate. Clause (2) withholds protection for disclosing “proprietary information, trade secret information, or information that is otherwise subject to a legal privilege or protected by law” without the employer’s written consent; clause (3) preserves “any existing rights under the National Labor Relations Act under United States Code, title 29”; clause (4) does not permit disclosing other employees’ wage information “to a competitor of their employer.”

Paragraph (c) requires an employer that provides a handbook to “include in the handbook notice of employee rights and remedies under this section.”

Paragraph (d) is the anti-retaliation clause, and it was broadened in 2023. Laws 2023, ch. 53, art. 11, § 23, struck “may” and inserted “shall” — “not” was retained — and then inserted the verb run in two places: “discharge, discipline, penalize, interfere with, threaten, restrain, coerce, or otherwise” before “retaliate,” and “or discriminate” after it. The paragraph now reads: “An employer shall not discharge, discipline, penalize, interfere with, threaten, restrain, coerce, or otherwise retaliate or discriminate against an employee for asserting rights or remedies under this section.” Those are the same nine verbs the Whistleblower Act uses in Minn. Stat. § 181.932, subd. 1 — discharge, discipline, penalize, interfere with, threaten, restrain, coerce, retaliate, discriminate — though § 181.932 adds a phrase § 181.172 does not, tying the prohibited action to “the employee’s compensation, terms, conditions, location, or privileges of employment.” What each of those verbs reaches is the subject of what “penalize” reaches. The 2023 act attached its own date to that section: “This section is effective July 1, 2023.”

Paragraph (e) supplies the section’s own action: “An employee may bring a civil action against an employer for a violation of paragraph (a) or (d),” and on a finding of violation the court “may order reinstatement, back pay, restoration of lost service credit, if appropriate, and the expungement of any related adverse records of an employee who was the subject of the violation.”

Two other doors exist for paragraphs (a) and (d), and they are not the same door. Section 181.944 adds a private action “to recover any and all damages recoverable at law, together with costs and disbursements, including reasonable attorney’s fees,” with injunctive and equitable relief — fees that paragraph (e) does not itself mention. And § 177.27, subd. 4, lets the commissioner issue a compliance order for “181.172, paragraph (a) or (d),” which triggers subd. 7: the commissioner “shall order the employer to pay to the aggrieved parties back pay, gratuities, and compensatory damages, less any amount actually paid to the aggrieved parties by the employer, and for an additional equal amount as liquidated damages.”

The boundary worth stating exactly, because the two chapters sit next to each other: the private action in § 177.27, subd. 8, with its automatic equal-amount liquidated damages and the mandatory fee award in subd. 10, reaches “sections 177.21 to 177.44 and 181.165.” Section 181.172 is not in that range.

The three, side by side

The note on § 181.172’s covered employer: the section does not define “employer,” and the definition in § 181.171, subd. 4, is expressly limited — it “applies to this section and sections 181.02, 181.03, 181.031, 181.032, 181.06, 181.063, 181.10, 181.101, 181.13, 181.14, and 181.16,” a list that does not include § 181.172. This page reports that and does not resolve it.

A currency note

The revisor’s page for § 363A.08 carries a banner reading “This section has been affected by law enacted during the 2026 Regular Session” and “363A.08 subd. 4 has been amended by Chapter 88, Article 1, Section 196”; nothing on this page is drawn from subdivision 4, and subdivision 8 — the subdivision this page quotes — has not been touched since it was added in 2023. Every other section cited here was checked one exact section at a time against the revisor’s table of Minnesota Statutes affected by session laws, and none of §§ 363A.03, 363A.15, 363A.28, 363A.33, 181.171, 181.172, 181.173, 181.1721, or 181.944 was amended, new, or repealed in the 2025 or 2026 sessions. Two of the sections cited here did change in 2025, in subdivisions this page does not use: Laws 2025, 1st Spec. Sess., ch. 6, art. 5, § 6, amended § 177.27, subd. 5, and Laws 2025, 1st Spec. Sess., ch. 13, art. 8, § 8, amended § 8.31, subd. 2c. Both amendments are already in the posted text, and this page cites §§ 177.27, subds. 4, 7, 8, and 10, and § 8.31, subds. 1 and 3a.

This page describes the machinery. Whether a particular question crossed the line in subdivision 8(b), whether a particular employer has 30 employees “at one or more sites in Minnesota,” and when a one-year period began are questions about facts and dates, and applying these sections to them is not what this page does. Related: was my firing illegal and every Minnesota employment deadline in one table.