The question sounds harmless when a recruiter asks it. What are you making now, or what did you make at your last job. It comes early, often on the first screening call, and it feels like a normal part of the process. It is not normal in a growing share of the country. Seventeen states plus Washington D.C. now bar private employers from asking about your pay history, and counts run as high as twenty two when you include states that only apply the rule to government jobs. A handful of cities have their own versions on top of the state rule.
The states on the private employer list include California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington. The exact terms differ from one to the next. Some bar the question outright. Some allow it after an offer is made. Some only stop a company from digging up the number on its own without your say so. Tennessee is not on that list, which means the question is still legal here and gets asked all the time.
The reason lawmakers went after this one question is worth understanding. Pay history acts as an anchor. If you are hired at a low salary once, the next employer prices you off that number, and the one after that prices you off the new one. A gap that started small early in a career compounds for thirty years, since raises and matches are usually set as a percent of what you already make. Nothing in that chain requires anyone to act in bad faith. The math does the harm on its own.
That compounding lands hardest on the people who started behind. Women, Black workers, and Latino workers are more likely to have been underpaid in a first job, and the anchor carries that gap forward no matter how well they perform later. So does anyone who took a pay cut to switch fields, anyone who worked at a nonprofit, anyone who took a lower offer during a downturn because they needed to eat. A person who left the workforce to raise kids or care for a parent gets anchored to a number from years ago. The question does not ask what you are worth. It asks what someone else already decided you were worth.
Knowing the rule only helps if you know what is still allowed. A company can ask what you are looking for, and that question is legal everywhere. It can share the range for the role, and in a number of states it now has to. If you volunteer your current pay without being asked, most laws let the employer use it, so the protection ends the moment you offer the number yourself. Recruiters at national firms sometimes follow the strictest rule everywhere to keep things simple, which can work in your favor. Others follow the rule of the state you would work in, not the state you live in.
So what do you say when it comes up. You do not have to be sharp about it, and you do not have to cite a law. A clean line works: I would rather focus on the value of this role, and based on what I see for this market I am targeting a range of X to Y. Then stop talking. If they push, ask what range they budgeted for the position, which turns the question around without any heat. If they refuse to give any range at all and keep pressing for your history, that is information about how they will treat you after you are hired.
The larger point is that pay secrecy was never neutral. It always favored the side of the table with more data, and the side with more data was never the applicant. These laws are one attempt to fix that, and they are uneven, patchy, and still missing from most of the map. You cannot control which state you live in or when a rule shows up there. You can control whether you walk into the room knowing the market rate for your work and whether you say a number first. Do the research before the call, and let the range you name come from the job, not from your past.
