Can a Prospective Employer Verify Previous Salary in California?

In California, a prospective employer generally cannot verify your previous salary. Labor Code Section 432.3 bars employers from asking about, researching, or relying on your pay history when deciding whether to hire you or what to offer.¹ Two narrow exceptions exist: pay you volunteer without any prompting, and pay that is already a public record.

What Employers Are Not Allowed to Do

The prohibition is broad. An employer cannot seek your salary history from you or from anyone else, orally or in writing, and cannot use that information as a factor in a hiring or compensation decision. “Salary history” is not limited to base pay. It covers bonuses, commissions, equity, health coverage, retirement contributions, and other financial benefits from a prior job.²

The rule applies to every employer in the state: private companies, state agencies, and local government. It also reaches beyond the hiring team. Recruiters, headhunters, staffing agencies, and background check companies are all covered, so an employer cannot pay a third party to do what the employer cannot do directly.¹

Document requests count too. A form asking you to produce W-2s, pay stubs, or tax returns to “confirm compensation” is a request for salary history and violates the law. Standard employment verification is different: confirming job titles, dates worked, and duties is fine. The line is crossed when the inquiry moves into what you were paid.

And if an employer stumbles onto your prior pay by some other route, through a mutual contact, a news article, or a social media post, that information still cannot be used to shape a hiring or compensation decision.¹

When You Volunteer the Information

Nothing stops you from bringing up your past pay on your own. If you disclose salary history voluntarily and without prompting, the employer may consider it in setting your compensation, and may verify the specific figures you shared, including by contacting the former employer to confirm those numbers.² Verification is limited to what you disclosed; it is not an opening for wider questions about your compensation history.¹

“Voluntary” is a strict word here. A recruiter who says candidates usually share their current salary is prompting you. An application field labeled “current compensation” is prompting you. A pause after “so, what are you making now?” is prompting you. The disclosure has to be your unprompted decision, not a response to a leading question or a blank on a form.

Salaries That Are Already Public

The ban does not cover compensation that is disclosable under the California Public Records Act or the federal Freedom of Information Act.² That mainly affects people who worked for a government agency, public university, or other taxpayer-funded employer whose pay data is available by law.

The exception reaches only as far as the public record does. If you spent five years in a public-sector job and then three in the private sector, an employer can look up the public-sector pay but cannot use that lookup as a bridge to ask about the private-sector years. The records also have to come from genuine official channels, not from leaks or improperly obtained data.

What You Can Ask the Employer For

The law flips the script on transparency. An applicant can make a reasonable request for the pay scale for a position, and the employer must provide it. The pay scale is a good-faith estimate of the salary or hourly range the employer reasonably expects to pay for the role.¹ Current employees have the same right for their own position.³

Employers with 15 or more employees have to go further and include the pay scale directly in every job posting, including postings run through third-party recruiters or job boards.³

What to Do If an Employer Crosses the Line

You have two routes if an employer asks for salary history, digs it up through a third party, or refuses to give you a pay scale.

The first is a written complaint to the Labor Commissioner. You must file within one year of learning about the violation. Identify the employer and describe what happened. If the Commissioner finds a violation, the civil penalty runs from $100 to $10,000 per violation.¹

The second is a civil lawsuit. You can sue for an injunction and any other relief the court considers appropriate, and you do not have to file an administrative complaint first.³

Note the timing rule: the one-year clock runs from when you learned about the violation, not when it happened. If you find out months later that an employer used your salary history behind the scenes, that discovery date starts the clock.

Voluntary Disclosure Still Has Limits

Even when you choose to share your prior pay and the employer uses it in setting your offer, that history cannot justify paying you less than a coworker of a different sex, race, or ethnicity who does substantially similar work. The California Equal Pay Act treats prior salary as an invalid defense to a pay-gap claim, whether or not the lower-paid worker disclosed the figure voluntarily.² The point of the rule is to keep past underpayment from following a worker into the next job.

1
California Legislative Information. California Labor Code Section 432.3
2
California Department of Industrial Relations. California Equal Pay Act – Frequently Asked Questions
3
California Legislative Information. California Labor Code Section 432.3