Minnesota's Pay Transparency Law Tells Employers What to Publish and Says Nothing About What Happens If They Don't

Minnesota’s pay transparency statute, Minn. Stat. § 181.173, is two subdivisions long. The first defines three terms. The second states the duty: publish a starting salary range and a general description of the benefits. That’s it. There’s no third subdivision. No penalty, no civil action, no administrative order, no poster, no recordkeeping requirement, and no anti-retaliation clause.

Don’t write that off as an oversight. The act that created § 181.173 — 2024 Minn. Laws ch. 110 — also amended Minn. Stat. § 177.27, subd. 4, the list of employment statutes the Commissioner of Labor and Industry may order an employer to comply with. That amendment added two sections to the list. Neither one was § 181.173. The legislature had the enforcement list open in the same chapter of session law where it wrote the new obligation, and it didn’t put the new obligation on the list.

So, as I read the chapter, the employer’s compliance question and the employee’s leverage question are different questions with different answers. The duty is real and easy to state. The remedy isn’t obvious, and the most plausible one runs through the Attorney General rather than through the Department of Labor and Industry or a private plaintiff.

What does § 181.173 actually require in a job posting?

Two things, in every posting, for every opening. Subdivision 2 states them:

(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.

Minn. Stat. § 181.173, subd. 2.

Three word choices in that language matter.

The disclosure is of the starting salary range. Not the full band for the classification, and not what a tenured incumbent earns. Subdivision 1(d) defines the term:

“Salary range” means 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.

Minn. Stat. § 181.173, subd. 1(d). The estimate is measured “at the time of the posting,” and the standard is good faith. A range that turns out wrong because the market moved isn’t the same thing as a range that was never a good-faith estimate when it went up.

The benefits disclosure isn’t limited to health and retirement, either. The statute requires “a general description of all of the benefits and other compensation,” and health and retirement are only examples (“including but not limited to”). Bonus eligibility, commission structure, equity, and paid leave are “other compensation” or “benefits” by any ordinary reading. What the statute asks for is a general description. Not a plan document, not a summary plan description, not dollar values.

And “A salary range may not be open ended” is a flat prohibition. Subdivision 2(b) supplies the alternative: if the employer doesn’t plan to offer a range at all, it lists a fixed pay rate. There’s no third option. “$70,000 and up,” “DOE,” “competitive,” and “$50,000–$180,000” for a single defined role are the postings that create exposure. That last one, because a range spanning a company’s entire wage structure isn’t a good-faith estimate of the minimum and maximum for that job opportunity.

Which employers are covered — and is it 30 employees, or 30 employees in Minnesota?

In Minnesota. This is the definition people most often paraphrase into something the statute doesn’t say:

“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.

Minn. Stat. § 181.173, subd. 1(b).

The count is of employees at Minnesota sites. A national employer with 6,000 employees and eleven of them working out of a Bloomington office isn’t, by the text, an “employer” under this section. Flip it around: a Minnesota-only company with 30 employees spread across four small locations is covered, because the statute says “at one or more sites.”

Look at what the definition sweeps in on the public side, too: the state itself, counties, towns, cities, school districts, and “other governmental subdivision.” Public employers in Minnesota are subject to § 181.173 by its own terms.

What the definition doesn’t have is a measuring period. Employment statutes commonly count heads over a stated window — a number of employees maintained for some number of working days or calendar weeks. Section 181.173 says only “employs 30 or more employees.” An employer whose headcount crosses 30 mid-year, or bounces around it seasonally, gets no statutory instruction about when the duty attaches or whether it ever lets go.

What counts as a “posting”?

More than a job board listing, and less than every hiring communication:

“Posting” means 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.

Minn. Stat. § 181.173, subd. 1(c).

Two features do real work.

The third-party clause means an employer can’t hand the problem to a staffing agency or a recruiter. If the recruiter’s listing is a solicitation intended to recruit applicants for a specific available position with the employer, it’s a “posting.”

The trailing clause — “that includes qualifications for desired applicants” — is a limiter, and it holds the least-discussed words in the section. A solicitation that states no qualifications arguably falls outside the definition. A “Now hiring, apply within” card in a window, or a general “we’re always looking for good people” page with no role and no qualifications, isn’t a solicitation “for a specific available position” that “includes qualifications.” I wouldn’t build a compliance strategy on that clause. But a plaintiff should know it’s there before treating every recruiting communication as a covered posting.

The definition also says nothing about where the job is. It defines the employer by reference to Minnesota sites. It doesn’t say the advertised position has to be located in Minnesota, and it doesn’t say the posting has to be viewable in Minnesota. For a covered employer advertising a fully remote position open to applicants anywhere, the face of the text has no geographic carve-out. No reported Minnesota decision construing § 181.173 has issued, and the Department of Labor and Industry hasn’t been given rulemaking authority over the section, so for now this is a question with a text and no gloss.

When did it take effect?

January 1, 2025 — and that date comes from the session law, not from the statutory default.

Section 181.173 was enacted as 2024 Minn. Laws ch. 110, art. 7, § 2, and that section carries its own effective-date clause: “This section is effective January 1, 2025.” Notice what the clause doesn’t say. When the same legislature enacted the captive-audience statute the year before, it wrote “This section is effective August 1, 2023, and applies to causes of action accruing on or after that date.” 2023 Minn. Laws ch. 53, art. 11, § 25. Section 181.173 has no comparable application clause. That’s no surprise. It creates no cause of action for the clause to attach to.

What happens to an employer that ignores it?

This is where the section gets genuinely strange, so I’ll walk through how chapter 181 gets enforced rather than assume a remedy exists.

The private-action statute doesn’t list it. Minn. Stat. § 181.171, subd. 1, is the provision that lets “[a] person” bring a civil action “directly to district court” for violations of certain chapter 181 sections, with mandatory costs and attorney fees under subdivision 3. It names the sections it covers: §§ 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 isn’t among them.

The commissioner’s compliance-order statute doesn’t list it. Minn. Stat. § 177.27, subd. 4, enumerates the statutes the commissioner may order an employer to comply with, and subdivision 5 lets the commissioner sue to enforce those orders. Section 181.173 isn’t on the list. As I said at the top, 2024 Minn. Laws ch. 110, art. 2, § 3 amended that very list — inserting §§ 181.10 and 181.64 — five articles before the same chapter created § 181.173.

The criminal penalty doesn’t reach the substantive violation. Minn. Stat. § 177.32, subd. 1, makes it a misdemeanor to hinder or delay the commissioner in performing duties under “sections 177.21 to 177.435, 181.01 to 181.723,” to refuse the commissioner entry, to falsify records, and — clause (9) — to “otherwise violate[] any provision of sections 177.21 to 177.44.” Clause (9)’s catchall stops at § 177.44. A pay-transparency violation isn’t a crime under it.

That leaves the Attorney General. Minn. Stat. § 181.1721 provides, in 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 sits inside chapter 181. On the face of § 181.1721, the Attorney General may enforce it with the § 8.31 toolkit: the civil investigative demand under § 8.31, subd. 2; injunctive relief and a civil penalty “in an amount to be determined by the court, not in excess of $25,000” under subd. 3; and an assurance of discontinuance under subd. 2b.

This isn’t a speculative reading. The Eighth Circuit applied exactly this framework to a different chapter 181 statute — Minnesota’s captive-audience law — in Minnesota Chapter of Associated Builders & Contractors v. Ellison, No. 24-3116 (8th Cir. Sept. 3, 2025). Holding that the Commissioner of Labor and Industry wasn’t a proper defendant, the court wrote: “the Act is not one of the enumerated sections of labor law with which the Legislature gave the Commissioner the power to ‘requir[e] an employer to comply’ and to ‘bring an action in the district court . . . to enforce or require compliance.’ Minn. Stat. § 177.27, subds. 4, 5.” Slip op. at 6–7. Of the Attorney General, the same opinion said: “There is no dispute that he has power to enforce the Act, see Minn. Stat. § 181.1721 . . . .” Slip op. at 7.

That reasoning carries straight over. Section 181.173, like § 181.531, is a chapter 181 obligation the legislature declined to put on the § 177.27, subd. 4 list. The Eighth Circuit treated that list as an exclusive enumeration and treated § 181.1721 as the Attorney General’s grant — not the commissioner’s.

Can a job applicant sue under § 8.31, subd. 3a?

That’s the open question, and it deserves a straight answer about how open it is, not a confident one either way.

Minnesota’s private attorney general provision reads:

In addition to the remedies otherwise provided by law, any person injured by a violation of any of the laws referred to in subdivision 1 may bring a civil action and recover damages, together with costs and disbursements, including costs of investigation and reasonable attorney’s fees, and receive other equitable relief as determined by the court.

Minn. Stat. § 8.31, subd. 3a. I’ve written separately about how § 8.31 works and who can use it.

The trouble in the text is the phrase “the laws referred to in subdivision 1.” Subdivision 1 directs the Attorney General to investigate “violations of the law of this state respecting unfair, discriminatory, and other unlawful practices in business, commerce, or trade,” then names a list of acts “specifically, but not exclusively.” Chapter 181 isn’t on that list. Section 181.1721 gives the Attorney General authority over chapter 181 by cross-reference. But subdivision 3a ties the private remedy to subdivision 1’s laws, not to everything the Attorney General is authorized to enforce.

Two more limits sit on top of that. In Ly v. Nystrom, 615 N.W.2d 302 (Minn. 2000), the Minnesota Supreme Court held: “the Private AG Statute applies only to those claimants who demonstrate that their cause of action benefits the public.” Id. at 314. The Court grounded that limit in the scope of the Attorney General’s own authority. Its reasoning: the private statute can reach no further than the authority it borrows, and that’s the Attorney General’s, whose duty is to protect public rather than individual interests. Id. at 313–14. A single applicant’s grievance about one posting is close to the exact case the public-benefit requirement was written to screen out; Ly itself involved a one-on-one transaction, and the Court held the statute didn’t reach it. And a § 8.31, subd. 3a plaintiff has to show injury. The damages theory for reading a posting that left out a salary range isn’t self-evident.

Here’s where the law stands: an applicant has a colorable but untested argument, and it’ll rise or fall on the public-benefit showing and on injury. I won’t tell anyone it’s settled.

The legislature knows how to write a remedy into chapter 181

Look at the rest of the same chapter and the omission looks deliberate, not accidental.

The legislature that drafted each of the first three knew how to attach consequences. The captive-audience statute in the third row — covered in detail in my companion piece on Minnesota’s ban on mandatory political and religious meetings — was enacted in 2023 with a fee-shifting private action written right into it. Section 181.173, passed the next year by the same body, has none.

What § 181.173 does not require

I list the missing obligations because compliance vendors sometimes sell them anyway:

• No poster. Compare § 181.531, subd. 3, which requires the commissioner to develop a poster and the employer to post it.
• No recordkeeping. The section imposes no duty to retain postings, salary-range calculations, or good-faith-estimate documentation.
• No applicant notice. Nothing requires the employer to give a covered applicant a copy of the range on request, or to explain a gap between the posted range and the offer.
• No anti-retaliation clause. An applicant or employee who complains about a noncompliant posting isn’t protected by § 181.173. Protection would have to come from somewhere else — the Whistleblower Act, § 181.932, if the complaint reports a suspected violation of law, or the wage disclosure protections of § 181.172 if the conduct is disclosure of the employee’s own wages.
• No rulemaking authority. The section gives no agency power to issue rules interpreting it.
• No cap on the width of a range, other than the good-faith-estimate standard and the ban on open-ended ranges.

So why should an employer comply?

Because the salary range in a posting is evidence in every case that follows, and because skipping it costs more than doing it, in ways that never show up in § 181.173.

A posted range is a written, contemporaneous, employer-authored statement of what a job is worth. In a Minnesota Equal Pay for Equal Work claim under § 181.67 — which turns on whether employees of opposite sexes are paid differently “for equal work on jobs the performance of which requires equal skill, effort, and responsibility” — or in a severance negotiation, the posting is a document the employer wrote and can’t un-write. An employer whose posted range for a role is $85,000–$105,000 and whose offers to one demographic group cluster at the bottom has built the comparison itself.

It cuts the other way for applicants and employees. The posting is the single most useful document an applicant can save, and it’s often gone from the internet within weeks. My advice never changes: screenshot it, with the URL and date visible, before the offer conversation starts. The same habit that makes the personnel record request under §§ 181.960–181.966 valuable is what makes a saved posting valuable.

And an employer’s exposure isn’t measured only by § 181.173. The Attorney General’s § 8.31 authority over chapter 181 comes with a civil investigative demand power that reaches well past the posting itself. As the Minnesota Supreme Court’s decisions in the Madison Equities litigation illustrate, a CID issued under § 8.31, subd. 2 can produce years of side litigation over its scope before any enforcement action is filed. An employer that would rather not explain its pay structure under oath has a cheap way out of that conversation: publish the range.

Where this leaves the two sides

For employees and applicants: § 181.173 gives you information, not a lawsuit. I treat the posting as evidence, not as a claim, and so should you. If the real grievance is pay disparity, the claim lives in § 181.67 and its remedy in § 181.68 — one year of unpaid wages, discretionary exemplary damages, and mandatory attorney fees — not in § 181.173. If the real grievance is that the employer forbade you to discuss your own pay, the claim lives in § 181.172, which does have a private action and is on the commissioner’s compliance-order list. If the employer promised one thing to get you to move and paid another, look at § 181.64. If the fight is over post-termination commissions, look at § 181.145.

For employers: compliance costs you a sentence in a template. The risk of skipping it isn’t a § 181.173 penalty — there isn’t one. It’s an Attorney General inquiry under § 181.1721 and § 8.31 that won’t stay confined to job postings, and a paper trail showing the company declined to say what it pays.

At Madgett Law, LLC I represent Minnesota employees in wage, commission, retaliation, and employment-statute claims, and I advise small Minnesota businesses on employment-practices compliance. If you’re an applicant or employee trying to figure out whether a posting, an offer, or a pay decision gives you a claim — or an employer trying to figure out what chapter 181 actually makes you do — call 612-470-6529 or send us a message.

Sources: Minn. Stat. § 181.173, subd. 1(b) (definition of “employer,” 30 employees at Minnesota sites, inclusion of governmental subdivisions), subd. 1(c) (definition of “posting,” third-party recruitment, electronic and printed form, qualifications limiter), subd. 1(d) (definition of “salary range,” minimum and maximum, good-faith estimate at time of posting), subd. 2(a) (starting salary range and general description of all benefits and other compensation), subd. 2(b) (fixed pay rate alternative; no open-ended range), revisor.mn.gov. 2024 Minn. Laws ch. 110, art. 7, § 2 (enactment of § 181.173; effective-date clause “This section is effective January 1, 2025”); art. 2, § 3 (amendment of Minn. Stat. § 177.27, subd. 4, adding §§ 181.10 and 181.64 to the compliance-order list), revisor.mn.gov session laws. 2023 Minn. Laws ch. 53, art. 11, § 25 (enactment of § 181.531; effective-date and accrual clause), revisor.mn.gov session laws. Minn. Stat. § 181.171, subd. 1 (enumerated sections for direct district court action), subd. 3 (mandatory attorney fees). Minn. Stat. § 177.27, subd. 4 (compliance orders; enumerated sections), subd. 5 (commissioner’s civil actions). Minn. Stat. § 177.32, subd. 1(1), (9) (misdemeanor; scope of catchall). Minn. Stat. § 181.1721 (attorney general enforcement of chapter 181 under § 8.31). Minn. Stat. § 8.31, subd. 1 (investigative mandate and enumerated acts), subd. 2 (civil investigative demand), subd. 2b (assurance of discontinuance), subd. 3 (injunctive relief; civil penalty up to $25,000), subd. 3a (private remedies; damages, costs of investigation, attorney fees). Minn. Stat. § 181.67, subd. 1 (equal pay prohibition); § 181.68, subds. 1–2 (right of action, exemplary damages, attorney fees); § 181.70 (misdemeanor). Minn. Stat. § 181.172(a), (d), (e) (wage disclosure protection and private action). Minn. Stat. § 181.531, subd. 2 (captive-audience private action, 90 days, fees), subd. 3 (poster). Minnesota Chapter of Associated Builders & Contractors v. Ellison, No. 24-3116, slip op. at 6–7 (8th Cir. Sept. 3, 2025) (Commissioner not an Ex parte Young defendant because the statute is not among the § 177.27, subd. 4 enumerated sections; Attorney General’s power under § 181.1721 undisputed), official opinion PDF at ecf.ca8.uscourts.gov. Ly v. Nystrom, 615 N.W.2d 302, 314 (Minn. 2000) (public-benefit requirement for Minn. Stat. § 8.31, subd. 3a claims), Caselaw Access Project. State of Minnesota Office of the Attorney General v. Madison Equities, Inc., No. A24-0107 (Minn. Jan. 7, 2026) (§ 8.31 investigative mandate, CID practice, and tolling), Minnesota Judicial Branch slip opinion. Minnesota CareerForce (Department of Employment and Economic Development), “Compensation and Benefits” (agency summary of the January 1, 2025 effective date), careerforce.mn.gov.

This article is general legal information about Minnesota law. It is not legal advice, it does not create an attorney–client relationship, and it does not promise or imply any particular outcome. Statutes change and the application of any statute depends on facts that are not described here.