California made companies post salaries. Here are the widest ranges.
We parsed 11,294 posted pay ranges from California-eligible job postings. The typical range is about a third wide; the widest spans $570,000.
Since January 1, 2023, California employers with 15 or more employees have to put a pay scale in their job postings (SB 1162, Labor Code §432.3). Nearly four years in, we wanted to know what those ranges actually look like. Are they useful ranges, or ranges so wide they say nothing?
We collected every open posting from 324 public job boards, kept the 13,029 postings that are located in California or open to remote workers anywhere in the US, and parsed their pay.
Source: Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby public job-board APIs, one snapshot 2026-10-11 · Data: jobs.json · Code: pay-range-radar
Show the data (10 rows)
| Company | Title | Bottom | Top | Width | Postings with this range |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anthropic | Performance Engineer | $280,000 | $850,000 | $570,000 | 4 |
| Anthropic | Performance Engineer, Inference Engine | $350,000 | $850,000 | $500,000 | 9 |
| OpenAI | RE / RS - Foundations, Search | $380,000 | $850,000 | $470,000 | 1 |
| Anthropic | Engineering Manager, Research Data Platform | $405,000 | $850,000 | $445,000 | 2 |
| Anthropic | Engineering Manager, GPU (ML Accelerator) | $500,000 | $850,000 | $350,000 | 15 |
| Neptune | Family Law (Prenup) Attorney | $312,000 | $624,000 | $312,000 | 1 |
| Anthropic | Staff Software Engineer, Claude Code | $320,000 | $625,000 | $305,000 | 1 |
| OpenAI | Software Engineer, Build Systems / CI | $185,000 | $490,000 | $305,000 | 4 |
| OpenAI | Researcher, Training | $300,000 | $600,000 | $300,000 | 1 |
| Y Combinator | Product Engineer, New Products | $185,000 | $485,000 | $300,000 | 1 |
Most ranges are reasonable. A few are enormous.
The median California-eligible range runs from its bottom to about 33.5% above it: a ratio of 1.33, or a median width of $55,000 a year. Three quarters of ranges (75%) have a top less than 1.5 times the bottom.
Only 2.8% of ranges have a top at least double the bottom. Those are the ranges where a candidate learns the least.
- Under 2×
- 2× or wider
Source: Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby public job-board APIs · Data: jobs.json · Code: pay-range-radar
Show the data (11 rows)
| Top ÷ bottom | Postings |
|---|---|
| 1.0–1.1× | 334 |
| 1.1–1.2× | 1,710 |
| 1.2–1.3× | 2,713 |
| 1.3–1.4× | 2,434 |
| 1.4–1.5× | 1,280 |
| 1.5–1.6× | 1,465 |
| 1.6–1.8× | 795 |
| 1.8–2.0× | 248 |
| 2.0–2.5× | 281 |
| 2.5–3.0× | 17 |
| 3×+ | 17 |
The widest range in dollars is on a Performance Engineer posting at Anthropic: $280,000 to $850,000, posted identically on 4 listings. The widest by ratio is an Applied Intuition research scientist role at $126,000 to $423,000, a top 3.4 times the bottom.
Wide ranges usually have a stated reason in the posting itself: one listing covering several levels ("I, II, Senior I, Senior II"), or an "open level" role. That is legal, and it is still less useful to a candidate than a range per level.
Ranges grow with seniority, but their shape stays the same
The median range for entry-level titles runs $90,000 to $125,325. For staff and principal titles it is $205,000 to $280,000. The width grows with the level, but the ratio barely moves: 1.31 for entry, 1.36 for staff and principal.
Source: Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby public job-board APIs · Data: jobs.json · Code: pay-range-radar
Show the data (8 rows)
| Seniority | Ranges | Median bottom | Median top | Median width |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intern | 49 | $90,000 | $124,800 | $20,800 |
| Entry | 191 | $90,000 | $125,325 | $30,000 |
| Mid | 3,871 | $146,880 | $200,000 | $50,000 |
| Senior | 2,993 | $165,000 | $225,750 | $55,500 |
| Staff / Principal | 1,938 | $205,000 | $280,000 | $70,000 |
| Manager | 1,344 | $170,000 | $232,275 | $55,000 |
| Director | 576 | $225,150 | $295,000 | $69,640 |
| VP / Executive | 83 | $221,000 | $311,000 | $65,100 |
Some ranges look like typos
Three postings had a bottom that looks one digit short, such as $17,100 to $253,000 for a senior data scientist role. We flagged them with a simple rule (top at least 5 times the bottom, and the top close to 10 times the bottom) and left them out of every median. We read them as data-entry errors at the source; we did not confirm with the employers.
What about postings with no range?
Of the California-eligible postings, 5.4% had no USD pay figure in the public job-board feed we read (3.8% for roles located in California, 10.8% for US-wide remote roles).
That number is about the feed, not the law. Some employers publish the range on their own careers page but not in the job-board API: we confirmed this for two boards and counted their 259 postings as unknown, leaving them out of the share. Others may do the same. Our parser also misses ranges shown as images or behind links. So we are not naming companies here; a missing range in a feed is a reason to check the posting, not evidence that a company broke the law.
Methods
- Collection. One snapshot on October 11, 2026 (UTC) of the public Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby job-board APIs for 324 boards, 0 failures: 32,263 open postings. The board list is curated, mostly US tech employers. It is not a sample of the labor market.
- California-eligible. The displayed location names California or a California city (Canadian "CA" excluded), or the role is remote across the US. The Labor Commissioner reads the law to cover remote roles that could be filled in California, so we include them.
- Pay. Structured ATS compensation fields first (8,077 postings), else a USD amount parsed from the description (4,009), skipping funding, quota and benefit amounts. Hourly pay is annualized at 2,080 hours and monthly pay at 12 months. Where a posting lists several location tiers, we prefer the California or Bay Area tier, else the highest tier. On-target-earnings ranges for sales roles (249) are excluded from the medians.
- Widest ranges. Identical ranges at one company are collapsed into one row, with the number of postings that share them.
- Seniority comes from title words (Intern, Junior/Associate, Senior, Staff/Principal, Manager, Director, VP). "Mid" is the catch-all for titles without a level word.
Limits
These are posted ranges, not what people are paid. The board list leans heavily toward tech, so the medians are high compared with California jobs overall. A single snapshot shows what was open on one night. Not legal advice.
Everything above is reproducible from the Pay Range Radar code and the findings file linked below.
Data and code
Every number and chart in this post is generated from these files:
The projects that collected the data:
- Pay Range Radar (source not published yet)
- Ghost Jobs (source not published yet)