If you run a business in British Columbia, some version of pay transparency already applies to you. The job posting rules have been in force since November 2023. The reporting requirement is the part still catching people off guard, mostly because the employee threshold keeps dropping. In 2024 it applied to organizations with 1,000 or more employees. In 2025, that dropped to 300. By November 1, 2026, it drops again to 50, which pulls in a much larger group of BC employers, many of whom have never had to think about this before.
Here is what actually applies to you, and what to do about it.
What every BC employer has to do right now
Two requirements have applied to virtually all provincially regulated BC employers since November 2023, regardless of company size.
Job postings must include pay. Any publicly advertised job posting, whether it is on your own website, a job board, or a recruitment platform posting on your behalf, must include the expected pay or pay range. That range needs to reflect what you are genuinely prepared to pay for the role. A placeholder range that does not match your actual budget is not compliant in spirit, even if it technically appears on the posting.
You cannot ask about salary history. Employers cannot ask a candidate what they currently earn or previously earned, whether the question is asked directly, buried in an application form, or generated automatically by an applicant tracking system. You can still ask what salary a candidate is seeking for the role, since that is about future expectations rather than past pay. If your careers page or ATS still has a “current salary” field, it needs to come out.
Neither of these requirements has a minimum employee count. If you are hiring in BC, they apply to you today.
The reporting requirement, and why the 2026 deadline matters more than the last two
Reporting employers must prepare and publish an annual pay transparency report by November 1 each year, based on their BC-based employee count as of January 1 of that year. The count includes full-time, part-time, temporary, and seasonal employees, and remote workers based in BC.
The threshold has phased in as follows:
- November 1, 2023: the BC government and its six largest Crown corporations
- November 1, 2024: employers with 1,000 or more BC-based employees
- November 1, 2025: employers with 300 or more BC-based employees
- November 1, 2026: employers with 50 or more BC-based employees
- After 2026: the threshold is expected to continue dropping toward smaller employers
That jump from 300 to 50 is the significant one. It moves the requirement from a short list of large organizations to a much broader group, including many mid-sized nonprofits, professional service firms, and growing companies that have never had to run this kind of process before.
What goes into the report
The report has to disclose gender-based pay differences across your workforce, calculated according to the government’s regulation. To prepare it, you will need to have already:
- Collected gender information from employees using the province’s Gender and Sex Data Standard, on a voluntary and self-identified basis
- Pulled clean payroll data, including base pay, bonuses, and any variable or equity compensation, in a format that can actually be analyzed
- Run the required calculations comparing pay across gender categories
The province has a reporting tool available through a Business BCeID account, but using it does not replace the requirement to understand what the report says about your organization before it goes public. There is no monetary penalty in the Act itself, but non-compliance is handled through public disclosure. The government can identify employers who have not published, which carries its own reputational cost.
The part that trips people up: data quality
In our experience, the biggest obstacle is rarely the calculation itself. It is that payroll systems were not built to capture gender data the way the Act requires, and historical compensation, especially bonuses and variable pay, is often stored inconsistently across systems or departments. An audit of what data you actually have, and where the gaps are, should be the first step, not something you discover two weeks before the deadline.
What to do now if you are a 2026 reporting employer
- Confirm your employee count as of January 1, 2026. If you are close to the 50-employee threshold, check whether you are over or under it, and whether that is likely to change before the measurement date matters again next year.
- Audit your payroll and HR data now. Identify where gender information, bonus history, and variable pay are missing or inconsistent, while there is still time to fix it.
- Review every active job posting for compliant, realistic pay ranges, and remove any salary history questions from applications or your ATS.
- Build in time for the actual report, not just the data pull. Reading your own results before they go public matters, both for accuracy and so you understand what the report is saying about your organization.
How Career Contacts can help
This is exactly the kind of work we do alongside clients as part of our Fractional HR Advisory services: auditing payroll and HR data for reporting readiness, reviewing job postings and hiring workflows for compliance, and walking through what your pay transparency report will actually show before it becomes public. If November 1, 2026 is on your radar and you have not started, now is the time.
Talk to our HR Advisory team about pay transparency compliance
This guide is for general information and does not constitute legal advice. For questions specific to your organization, consult employment counsel or contact the BC government’s Pay Transparency team directly at PayTransparency@gov.bc.ca.
