Astron Solutions published a clear-eyed rundown earlier this month on the state of pay transparency in 2026 — the widening patchwork of salary-range disclosure laws, salary-history bans, and pay-data reporting requirements that now reaches seventeen states, with more on the way. Their guidance to employers is practical and hard to argue with: know which laws apply to you, standardize your job descriptions, build defensible pay ranges from real market data, audit regularly for equity, and align to the strictest standard when you operate across state lines.

It’s a good piece, and if you carry any responsibility for compliance you should read it. But read it closely and you’ll notice something — not a gap in Astron’s argument, but a boundary drawn around the entire conversation. Pay transparency, as the laws define it and as most employers are racing to implement it, is about one number: the salary range. The band in the job posting. The floor and the ceiling of base pay. That’s where the disclosure obligation begins, and for most organizations, that’s exactly where transparency stops.

Here’s what we think this means for HR and Total Rewards leaders designing variable comp programs. If you do everything the transparency wave asks of you — post the range, drop the salary-history question, defend the band — you will have made base pay legible to your workforce and left the bonus every bit as opaque as it was before. And for a lot of your people, the bonus is the part of the paycheck they understand least and feel most. Making the salary range clear while the bonus stays a black box doesn’t close the trust gap Astron is pointing at. It just relocates it.

In our experience, that’s the more interesting problem — and it’s the one no statute will ever solve for you. A few principles we’d hold onto.

1. The law cares about the range. Your employees care about the reason.

Astron makes a point worth sitting with: employees increasingly want to understand not just what they’re paid, but why. A salary range in a job posting answers a market question — is this role priced competitively? It says nothing about the second number on the pay stub, the one that actually moves. When an employee can see the band their base salary sits in but can’t explain how their bonus was calculated, you haven’t delivered transparency. You’ve delivered half of it, and drawn a bright line around the half you left dark.

2. A visible salary band next to an unexplained bonus makes the bonus look worse, not better.

This is the part most organizations miss. Transparency isn’t neutral. The moment you publish the range, you set an expectation that pay decisions have logic behind them — and employees carry that expectation straight over to everything else in their compensation. A bonus that arrives as a number with no visible derivation used to read as “well, that’s just how bonuses work.” Sitting next to a transparent salary band, the same bonus reads as “why won’t they explain this one?” You can quietly raise the temperature on your bonus program by being transparent about everything except your bonus program. We’ve watched it happen: an organization does careful, honest work on its ranges, communicates them well, and then fields a wave of questions it didn’t expect — not about base pay, which people now understand, but about the bonus, which they suddenly notice they don’t.

3. Give the bonus the same treatment the range gets: a target, mechanics, and a curve.

A salary range works as transparency because it has structure an employee can see — a floor, a midpoint, a ceiling, and a rationale for where a person lands. Bonuses deserve the same architecture, made visible. What is the target, expressed as a percentage of pay or a dollar figure? What are the measures, and how are they weighted? What does the payout curve look like — where is threshold, where is target, where is the cap, and what happens in between? None of that is confidential, and none of it waits on a change in the law. It waits on a decision: that the bonus is a designed thing employees are allowed to understand, not a discretionary surprise delivered once a year. The organizations that do this well don’t hand employees the full plan document and call it transparency. They translate it — a target, a small number of measures the person can actually influence, and a plain-language picture of what strong performance pays versus average performance. That translation is the work, and it’s work worth doing before the regulatory pressure that’s now on base pay finds its way to variable pay too.

4. Real transparency is measured by prediction, not disclosure.

A disclosure is a document. Transparency is whether an employee, halfway through the year, can look at their own performance and reasonably predict what their bonus will do. That’s the test we’d apply. If the honest answer is “no one could predict that,” the problem isn’t communication — it’s design. No amount of transparency language will paper over a bonus tied to a metric employees can’t see or can’t move. In that case the transparency conversation is doing you a favor: it’s exposing a plan that was never legible to begin with, and it’s better to learn that now than in an exit interview.

5. You’re already standardizing base pay for compliance. Run the same audit on the bonus.

Multi-state compliance is pushing organizations to do something genuinely useful — build consistent, defensible pay structures instead of a pile of one-off decisions. That discipline shouldn’t stop at base pay. If you’re auditing salary ranges for equity and consistency, audit the bonus the same way. Are similar roles working from similar targets? Are the measures consistent across teams, or does every manager run a private version? Is the payout curve the same for two people doing the same job? The variable side of pay is where inconsistency hides most easily, precisely because no law is yet making you look at it.

Astron’s closing line is that transparency, done well, is more than compliance — it’s a strategic advantage in a competitive talent market. We agree completely. We’d only add that the advantage becomes real when transparency reaches the part of pay that is actually variable. Anyone can publish a salary band. The organizations that earn durable trust are the ones whose employees can look at their bonus and see a plan, not a mystery — the same clarity the law is now demanding for base pay, extended to the number that was supposed to reward performance in the first place.

If you’re looking for tools to simplify how you manage and administer bonuses — and how you show employees the logic behind what they’re actually paid — let’s talk.