Key takeaways
- Massachusetts gives employers a complete defense to an equal pay claim if they’ve run a good-faith self-evaluation within the past three years and made reasonable progress on what it found.
- There’s no required format. The law asks for something reasonable in detail and scope for a company your size.
- Pay equity software can run the calculation, but it won’t group your jobs, judge whether a pay difference is defensible, or build a plan to close a gap over two budget cycles.
- One key rule to know before you start: you can’t fix a gap by cutting someone’s pay.
Either you’ve decided to look at whether people doing comparable work are paid comparably or you’ve been forced to look at it. The next question is who runs the audit. A lawyer? An HR consultant? A software platform?
Here’s what Massachusetts law asks for, what each kind of help covers, and how to choose.
What Massachusetts asks for in a pay equity self-evaluation
The Massachusetts Equal Pay Act does something unusual. It offers employers a complete defense to a claim, and it tells you how to earn it.
Under the statute, an employer that has completed a good-faith self-evaluation of its pay practices within the previous three years, before any action is filed, gets an affirmative defense.
But there are two conditions:
- The evaluation has to be reasonable in detail and scope in light of the size of the employer.
- You have to show reasonable progress toward closing any gender-based wage differences it turned up. The burden of proving both sits with the employer.
That first condition is more generous than most employers assume. The Boston Bar Association confirms there’s no prescribed method or form. A careful, documented review scaled to your headcount can qualify. Buying an enterprise platform is not a requirement for being protected.
A few specifics worth considering before you start:
- Pay differences can be legal. The law recognizes bona fide seniority, merit, and productivity systems, plus geographic location, education, training or experience, and travel requirements.
- You can’t level down. Corrective action may not include lowering someone’s salary to close a gap. If your plan for the budget problem was to hold one person flat while another catches up, that works. Cutting pay does not.
- Three years is the outside edge. Pay drifts every time you hire, promote, or counteroffer. Most employers we work with audit on a shorter cycle after they’ve done it once.
What an employment lawyer brings to a pay equity audit
What you get. Legal advice. A lawyer can interpret how the law applies to a specific pay difference you’re worried about and take over if a claim shows up. If a separation or a back-pay adjustment comes out of the audit, they should be drafting it.
What to consider. Lawyers are the most expensive option per hour, and they generally don’t build pay or merit structures with you. There’s also a wrinkle with confidentiality. Keeping the audit protected requires your lawyer to run it and to hire the analyst directly. Hiring a consultant yourself and forwarding the results to your attorney later doesn’t do it. And if you plan to use the audit as your Massachusetts defense, you’ll be handing it over anyway.
Best when: There’s already a charge or a lawsuit, you have reason to think the exposure is significant before you start, or you’re a federal contractor.
What an HR or compensation consultant brings
What you get. The analysis and the judgment around it. A consultant decides which jobs are comparable and documents why, tells you whether a flagged gap has a legitimate explanation behind it, and builds a plan to close the ones that don’t. If your grades and ranges are informal, they can fix the structure underneath so next year’s audit measures against something real. Most will also help you walk your leadership team or your board through the findings.
What to consider. A consultant can’t give you legal advice. For a proactive audit that’s fine, since the Massachusetts defense depends on producing the evaluation rather than protecting it.
Best when: You’re doing this on your own initiative, you want the gaps fixed rather than just measured, and you’d rather spend the budget on the remediation than on billable hours.
What pay equity software brings
What you get. The calculation, done fast and repeatably. The platform runs the comparison, flags outliers, and lets you rerun it without rebuilding anything.
What to consider. Software groups people by whatever fields you feed it, so you’re still the one deciding that two different titles are comparable work and defending that call later. It won’t tell you whether a gap tied to fifteen years of seniority is legitimate and one with no documented reason isn’t. And it stops at the number. The remediation plan, the budget, and the conversation with leadership all stay on your desk, and Massachusetts asks for reasonable progress, which is a judgment a person has to make.
Best when: Your job architecture is already clean and somebody in-house knows compensation well enough to interpret the output.
Where to start
An evaluation is only as good as the pay structure underneath it. If your pay grades and ranges are informal, the audit will surface those issues along with equity problems, and you may have to remediate both things.
That’s the work we do. Compensation Plan Design is project-based with a clear scope and fee before we start, run by our team with New England wage data, and it produces the structure a self-evaluation is measured against.
Pay equity is the evaluation behind your numbers. Pay transparency is what you have to publish about them, and Massachusetts employers with 25 or more employees are already posting ranges.
If you’re working through the disclosure and reporting requirements too, the two projects are worth sequencing together.
Not sure which one you need first? Let’s figure it out together.