The Same $75,000 Job Posting, Three Ontario Salary Ranges

Yes. If you employ 25 or more people in Ontario, you have to publish a real salary range on every job posting that goes outside your company. Ontario added salary range requirements to the Employment Standards Act, effective January 1, 2026, under the Working for Workers Four Act (Bill 149). But posting a number isn't the same as complying. The range has to be honest, it can't span more than $50,000, and it needs two more disclosures most job ads still skip.

That's the short version of the salary range job posting rule. Here's what actually has to appear, and how to build a defensible range when nobody's ever formalized your pay bands.

Here's where HR managers actually get stuck. Not on whether the law applies to them. On what number to type into the box.

A range so wide it means nothing breaks the Act just as surely as posting no range at all. $45,000 to $110,000 for a coordinator role isn't a range. It's a shrug with a dollar sign on it.

And that's not because you don't understand compensation. It's because the Act handed you an obligation with no formula attached. Nobody gave you a comp structure to defend a number with. So you're guessing at what passes review, not what's actually true about the job.

Does the Salary Range Requirement Apply to Your Posting?

Two thresholds decide this. Both are easy to check.

First, headcount. The salary range requirement only applies to employers with 25 or more employees, counted on the day the posting goes live, under Ontario Regulation 476/24. Under 25 employees, you're not caught by this rule yet, though nothing stops you from posting a range anyway.

Second, the ceiling. If expected compensation, or the top of your range, exceeds $200,000 a year, the requirement doesn't apply to that posting either. Executive and senior specialist roles fall outside the Act for exactly this reason.

Everything between those two lines, a 25-plus employee organization posting a role under $200,000, needs a range. No exception for "we don't have formal bands yet." The law doesn't care whether your comp structure is formal. It cares whether the number on the posting is real.

What a Compliant Salary Range Job Posting Actually Includes

Four things have to be on the posting, not buried in a linked PDF:

• Expected compensation, or a range with a spread of $50,000 or less
• If pay includes more than one type of compensation, hourly rate plus commission, base plus bonus, each type disclosed separately, not folded into one blended figure
• Whether the posting represents an existing, real vacancy, not a listing kept live to build a talent pool
• Whether artificial intelligence is used to screen, assess, or select applicants

Two more Bill 149 provisions ride along with the range rule, and an investigator checks them at the same time. You can't require "Canadian experience" in the posting or the application form. And if AI touches your applicant screening, you have to say so in the ad itself, not in a privacy policy three clicks away.

Same $75,000 Job, Three Ways to Post It

The gap between compliant and compliant-but-useless is smaller than most HR managers think. Here's one coordinator role, posted three ways.

Meeting the Salary Range Requirement With No Formal Comp Bands

1. Pull three real postings for the same role, same region, from the last six months. Indeed, LinkedIn, your own applicant tracking history.
2. Set the low end at what you'd genuinely offer your weakest acceptable candidate, not a discount number meant to look affordable to leadership.
3. Set the high end at what you'd pay someone who arrives with everything on the job description, including the parts you'd love but don't require.
4. Keep the spread under $50,000. If your honest range runs wider, split the requisition into two levels, Coordinator I and Coordinator II, rather than posting one range that's technically legal and practically meaningless.
5. Write down how you got the number. Not for HR's files. For the day a candidate, or an inspector, asks why.

None of this requires a job evaluation project or a consultant. It requires an honest fifteen minutes and a willingness to commit to a number in writing. Our HR compliance checklist for Canada walks through where this fits alongside your other 2026 obligations.

What Happens If You Don't Comply

Enforcement runs the way most Employment Standards Act violations do. An employee or applicant files a complaint. An employment standards officer investigates. A compliance order follows. Ontario hasn't published a fine schedule specific to this section yet, so the honest answer is: don't be the test case. Fix the posting before it needs fixing. If a complaint does land on your desk, our guide to a Ministry of Labour complaint covers what happens next.

Where the Range Should Live So This Isn't a Scramble Every Time

The real fix isn't a better calculator. It's not rebuilding the range from scratch every time a requisition opens.

In Workzoom, a pay scale range attaches to the job profile once, in the Organization module. When Recruiting posts that job, the range travels with it. Post the same coordinator role again in eight months and you're not starting over. You're checking whether the number still holds. If compensation needs to flex with performance, Talent Suite comp change requests route into that same job profile, so the range stays current. For the rest of the hiring stack this plugs into, see our plain-English HRIS guide and our piece on what's actually broken in Canadian recruitment.

Post the honest range once. Attach it to the job. The next posting takes five minutes instead of a fire drill.