For a long time, salary negotiations followed a predictable script. Employers asked what you made at your last job. You answered. That number quietly set the ceiling for everything that followed.
It didn’t matter if you were underpaid, inexperienced at negotiating, or coming out of a weak job market. Your past salary became the reference point, and escaping it was hard. Over time, this is how wage gaps stuck around, especially for women and minority workers. Not because companies announced they were paying people unfairly, but because they kept building new offers on top of old ones.
Eventually, states started paying attention.
Over the last several years, a growing number of states and cities have passed what are known as salary history bans. California, New York, Colorado, Illinois, and others made it illegal for employers to ask what you earned in previous roles. The goal wasn’t subtle. Lawmakers wanted to force companies to price jobs based on the work itself, not on what a candidate happened to accept years earlier.
The logic behind these laws is hard to argue with. A past salary isn’t a clean measure of value. It reflects timing, leverage, and circumstance far more than skill or impact. If employers can’t ask for that number, they can’t use it to anchor offers. They have to start somewhere else.
In many places, the laws go further. Salary history bans are often paired with pay transparency rules that require employers to disclose the pay range for a role, either in the job posting or when a candidate asks. Cities like New York and states like California and Colorado now require this by law.
That changes the power dynamic in a way most job seekers still haven’t fully absorbed. The old system depended on information asymmetry. Employers knew the budget. Candidates guessed. Now, in many jurisdictions, the guessing is gone. The range exists before you ever say a number.
But laws don’t enforce themselves in conversations. Habits linger.
A lot of candidates still answer salary history questions automatically. They worry about seeming uncooperative or awkward. They assume declining will hurt their chances. In states with bans, that fear is misplaced. You are allowed to refuse. The law explicitly protects that choice.
The updated script doesn’t require confidence or confrontation. It’s short and boring, which is exactly why it works:
“I prefer not to discuss salary history. Could you share the budgeted range for this role?”
In places with pay transparency requirements, recruiters are often required to answer. In places without them, many will anyway, because this is increasingly standard practice.This isn’t about playing hardball. It’s about adjusting to the reality that the rules have already changed. Salary history questions didn’t disappear because companies suddenly became generous. They disappeared because lawmakers decided the old system was broken.
