A $70,000 to $140,000 Salary Range Tells Candidates Nothing
A $70,000 spread isn't pay transparency — it's an unfinished decision about what the job is. Here's what wide bands cost you in the funnel, and how to post a number you can actually defend on the first call.
By JobPost Team · Sep 27, 2026 · 4 min read
A posting that says $70,000 to $140,000 is not disclosing a salary. It is disclosing that nobody involved has decided what the job is.
Pay transparency rules are landing across the country — British Columbia has required an expected pay range in public postings since November 2023, and Ontario's requirement takes effect January 1, 2026. The law can force a number into the field. It cannot force that number to mean anything. So employers comply by posting a band so wide it carries no information, and everyone downstream pays for it.
Why The Band Got That Wide
Wide bands are rarely malicious. They come from four places, and they are worth telling apart because the fixes differ.
One posting is covering two jobs. The hiring manager will take an intermediate or a senior, depending on who turns up. Rather than write two postings, they write one and stretch the range across both levels. This is the most common cause and the easiest to fix.
The internal band got pasted in. Compensation teams maintain job-family bands that span years of progression — the range someone could earn in that role over an entire tenure, including promotions within level. That is a legitimate HR artifact. It is not what you are prepared to pay a new hire in Q1, and pasting it into a posting confuses the two.
Someone wants negotiating room. If the range starts low, a candidate who names a low number can be met there. This works exactly once per candidate and costs more than it saves.
Nobody has approved the budget yet. The role was posted before finance signed off, and the range is a guess bracketed on both sides by uncertainty.
Public-sector and unionized postings are a real exception: a grid step is a grid step, the range is genuine, and everyone reading it knows how to interpret it. Most private-sector wide bands are not that.
The Inversion It Creates In Your Funnel
Here is the part that surprises hiring managers. A wide band does not attract everyone equally. It sorts your applicants in the wrong direction.
A candidate currently earning $72,000 sees $70,000 to $140,000 and reads the top of the range as reachable. They apply, optimistic, and they will be disappointed later.
A candidate currently earning $130,000 sees the same posting and does the arithmetic differently. They read the midpoint — about $105,000 — as the real target, because in their experience that is how bands work. They assume the $140,000 is reserved for someone with a rare credential or an internal promotion path. They do not apply, and you never learn they existed.
So the wide band suppresses applications from the people qualified for the top of it and inflates applications from people qualified for the bottom. You end up screening a larger, weaker pool and concluding the market is thin.
The spread: $70,000 The distance between the top and bottom of a $70,000–$140,000 posting — as much as the entire low end of the range.
Where The Cost Actually Lands
Two places, both expensive.
The first is the screening call. When the posted range is uninformative, compensation becomes the agenda of the first conversation instead of the work. Fifteen minutes that should have gone to the problem the team is solving go to a negotiation neither side has the authority to close.
The second is the offer. A candidate who anchored on $140,000 through four rounds and receives $94,000 does not experience that as an offer. They experience it as a bait-and-switch, and they tell people. You lose the candidate, you lose the six weeks, and you lose a piece of your reputation in a market where senior people talk to each other constantly.
How To Post A Number You Can Defend
None of this requires disclosing your full compensation philosophy.
- Split the posting by level. If you would genuinely hire either an intermediate or a senior, run two postings with two ranges. It costs an hour and it fixes the sorting problem outright.
- Post the hiring range, not the career range. The band that governs raises over five years is internal. The number a candidate needs is what a new hire starts at. Say $96,000 to $112,000 and note that the broader band extends higher with tenure.
- Name what moves someone across it. Two or three concrete factors: depth in a specific system, whether the role includes managing, bilingual capability if the job actually requires it. Vague references to "experience" do not count.
- Put the target in the first conversation. "We're aiming to land this at around $105,000" ends the guessing on both sides in one sentence.
- If the budget genuinely isn't approved, say so. "Range pending final approval; we expect to land between X and Y" is more credible than a $70,000 spread and it buys you goodwill instead of suspicion.
What Candidates Should Do With A Wide Band
Don't self-select out, and don't wait until round four to raise it. Ask two questions on the first call:
Where in that range are you targeting for this hire? A recruiter who cannot answer has told you the role is undefined, which is useful information about the team as well as the pay.
What did the last person hired into this role start at? Past behaviour beats stated intent. If the answer is near the bottom of a very wide band, treat the top as decoration and decide whether the actual number works for you.
Getting to that answer in week one instead of week six is the whole point.