There's a question Virginia job applicants have dreaded for generations: "What are you making at your current job?" Answer low, and the offer gets anchored to your old salary. Refuse, and you risk the job. Either way, a paygap follows you from employer to employer like a shadow.
As of July 1, 2026, that question is illegal in Virginia.
What employers can no longer do
Under the new Wage Transparency Act, a Virginia employer may not:
- Ask a job applicant about wage or salary history;
- Rely on salary history in deciding whether to hire you;
- Use salary history to set your pay; or
- Retaliate against you for refusing to disclose it.
There is one narrow exception: if you volunteer your history, unprompted, after a conditional offer, the employer may use it, but only to offer you more than it otherwise would have.
What employers now must do
Every job posting, internal or external, must include a good-faith salary range for the position. And "good faith" has teeth: the breadth of the range is a factor in whether it was honest. A posting that says "$40,000–$400,000 depending on experience" is an invitation to a claim, not complian.
The 15-day step you cannot skip
Here is the procedural detail that will decide real cases. For a job posting violation, you cannot go straight to court. You must first notify the employer in writing, and the employer then has 15 business days to fix the posting. Only if it fails to cure can you file suit. Document the notice, date, method, recipient, because it is the key that unlocks the courthouse door.
For violations aimed at you directly, the interview question, the lowball offer justified by your old pay, retaliation for refusing to answer, the private right of action is not conditioned on that cure window.
What you can recover and an honest word about it
The law gives applicants and employees a private cause of action for actual damages and equitable relief. Separately, the Attorney General, on behalf of the Commonwealth, can investigate and seek civil penalties of $1,000 to $10,000 per violation, but those penalties go to the Commonwealth, not to you.
Here is the honest part most articles skip: the Act does not award attorneys' fees to a prevailing worker.
This wasn't an oversight. When the companion bills (HB 636 and SB 215) were introduced in January 2026 by their Chief Patrons—Delegate Michelle Lopes Maldonado and Senator Jennifer B. Boysko—the legislation had real teeth: statutory damages up to $10,000 and explicit fee-shifting.
But as the bills moved through the House and Senate Commerce and Labor committees, business lobbying groups, specifically the Virginia Chamber of Commerce and the Virginia Retail Federation, pushed back hard. They lobbied to eliminate their exposure to high-dollar litigation over missing ranges on job boards.
To secure enough votes to get the bill to Governor Spanberger's desk, the sponsors had to compromise. In fact, Delegate Maldonado herself had to introduce the floor amendment that watered down her own bill. That amendment made massive concessions to employers: it stripped out the explicit "reasonable attorneys' fees" language, removed statutory damages entirely, and added the 15-day "right to cure" shield.
The result was a law intentionally watered down by corporate lobbyists to make it economically impractical for most workers to sue over a simple missing salary range. Proving "actual damages" just because an employer illegally asked your salary history is incredibly difficult. Even the addition of reasonable attorneys fees would have given law firms the opportunity to break even on taking a case under the new bill. Without the ability to shif attorneys' fees onto onto law-breaking employers, illegal interview questions become a violation that, on its own, it is rarely a lawsuit worth your time or ours.
Why the claim is still worth more than it looks
The salary-history question is rarely the whole story. It is usually evidence of a bigger one. If an employer anchored your offer to your old pay, and the result is that you earn less than colleagues doing the same work,
the same facts feed directly into equal pay and pay discrimination claims, under Virginia's equal pay and anti-discrimination frameworks and their federal counterparts. Those claims do shift attorneys' fees, and some add
liquidated damages on top of back pay. That is where the leverage lives.
So treat a transparency violation as a thread to pull. Screenshots matter: a posting without a range, an email asking for your pay history, notes from the interview, save them all. When J. Madison PLC's proprietary case builder Cloud Counsel analyzes a pay transparency matter, it does not rest your case on the new statute alone: the same facts are automatically mapped against those fee-shifted companion claims. If the new law's remedies are thin on your facts, your case file may already standing on established, and better-compensated, ground.
If it happened to you
If an interviewer asked what you were making, if an offer was cut after you refused to share your pay history, or if you are staring at a posting with no range at all, talk to us to learn about your options. Cloud Counsel will walk you through documenting your timeline of events and a J. Madison PLC may be able to help you with the required 15-day written notice for violating employers.