Equal pay, salary history, and the pay scale you are owed

California rebuilt its Equal Pay Act a decade ago and has been tightening it since: substantially similar work, employer-side burdens, a salary-history ban, and pay scales you can simply ask for. Most workers still don’t know what the statute lets them do this week.

Pay discrimination rarely announces itself. It compounds quietly — a starting salary anchored to a past job, a “market adjustment” that reached one desk and not another — until two people doing the same work are years apart in pay. California’s answer is one of the country’s strongest statutes, and its most useful features are the ones you can use before any lawsuit exists.

1 · The modern standard

The Equal Pay Act forbids paying employees of another sex, race, or ethnicity more for substantially similar work — work viewed as a composite of skill, effort, and responsibility, performed under similar working conditions.¹ Not “equal” work, not identical titles: substantially similar. Different job titles for the shipping clerks and the receiving clerks stopped working as a defense the day that phrase entered the statute.

Once you show the pay gap for substantially similar work, the burdens are the employer’s: it must prove the entire differential is explained by seniority, merit, a system measuring production, or a bona fide factor other than sex, race, or ethnicity — education, training, experience — applied reasonably and actually accounting for the whole gap.² “We pay market” is not a system. “He negotiated harder” fares poorly. And one explanation is banned outright:

2 · Salary history is off the table

Employers may not ask about your salary history, and may not rely on it to justify pay.³ The logic is the statute’s heart: anchoring today’s salary to yesterday’s imports yesterday’s discrimination and compounds it forever. If an application, a recruiter, or an interviewer asks what you currently make, the lawful answers include declining — and the question itself tells you something about the employer’s compliance culture.

3 · The pay scale is yours for the asking

Two disclosure rights with no lawsuit required. Applicants: employers must provide the pay scale for a position on reasonable request, and larger employers must publish it in the job posting itself.⁴ And since 2026, a posted or provided “pay scale” must be a good-faith estimate of what the employer reasonably expects to pay — a range wide enough to mean nothing is no longer even arguably compliant.⁴ Employees: you are entitled, on request, to the pay scale for your own current position. That request — one polite written sentence — converts suspicion into data. So does conversation: discussing wages with coworkers is protected activity under multiple statutes, whatever the handbook implies.⁵

4 · How these cases are built

From the employer’s own structures: pay bands, compensation worksheets, the spreadsheet HR maintains and discovery reaches. Comparators are identified by work performed, not title held. The employer’s justifications are tested factor by factor against the statutory requirements — bona fide, reasonably applied, explaining the entire differential — and the gaps between rationale and arithmetic are the case. Retaliation for invoking any of this is separately actionable, on the act’s own terms.⁵

5 · This week, if you suspect a gap

Request your pay scale in writing. Note your comparators — who does substantially similar work, as best you know it. Pull your own pay history at the company: offer letter, raises, the reasons given. Do not resign over a suspicion; gaps are proved by people still inside the data. And if the numbers you gather look the way you feared, send them to us — pay cases are arithmetic before they are argument, and we are at home in both.

Notes

1. Lab. Code §1197.5(a), (b).
2. Lab. Code §1197.5(a)(1)–(3) (factors must be applied reasonably and account for the entire wage differential).
3. Lab. Code §432.3.
4. Lab. Code §432.3 (pay-scale disclosure; posting requirement for larger employers; as amended by S.B. 642 (2025), eff. Jan. 1, 2026, the scale must be a good-faith estimate of the pay the employer reasonably expects to offer).
5. Lab. Code §§232, 1197.5(k).

Related writing: How discrimination is actually proved · Reading your wage statement

This article states California law as of its revision date and is analysis, not legal advice. Reading this site does not create an attorney-client relationship. Attorney advertising.