The Equal Pay Registration Certificate and HB 3129 — who is covered, what has to be filed and disclosed, by when, and what happens if it isn’t.
Illinois employers face two distinct pay obligations with two different coverage thresholds. Confusing them is the most common mistake we see.
The Equal Pay Registration Certificate is a filing obligation that bites at 100 employees in Illinois. HB 3129 is a disclosure obligation that bites at 15 employees. An organisation with 40 Illinois employees has posting duties but no certificate to file. An organisation with 400 has both, and they draw on the same underlying pay structure.
Both are administered by the Illinois Department of Labor. Neither is aimed at executives, and both reach them anyway — which is covered on our Chicago executive compensation page.
Any private employer with 100 or more employees in the State of Illinois. Government entities and political subdivisions are excluded.
Businesses recertify every two years after their first submission. The IDOL portal issues automated reminders at 180 days and 60 days before a certificate expires. Those reminders are a courtesy, not a defence — the obligation sits with the employer regardless.
IDOL may impose a civil penalty or fine of up to $10,000. Applications can be rejected, and existing certificates suspended or revoked. Notices of violation carry sliding penalty scales tied to how quickly a deficiency is cured. Paying a penalty does not remove the requirement to certify.
The filing itself is administrative. The difficulty is that assembling a wage-by-gender-by-race-by-county dataset frequently surfaces pay differences nobody had looked at before — and once they are in a document signed by an officer and filed with a regulator, “we didn’t know” stops being available. The right sequence is to run the pay equity analysis first, understand what the data says, and file second.
Employers with 15 or more employees, effective 1 January 2025, for positions performed at least partly in Illinois.
The pay scale and benefits. Compensation is defined to include stock options, bonuses, and other incentive-based compensation — not just base salary. The benefits element may be satisfied by hyperlinking to a general benefits description on the employer’s own website.
Where an external posting covers a role that current employees could apply for as a promotion, that opportunity must be announced, posted, or otherwise made known to all current employees within 14 days of the external posting. This is the provision most often missed, because it lives in the recruiting workflow rather than the posting template.
Publishing a pay scale forces an employer to have one. Organisations that had been managing pay by individual negotiation discover they need range architecture, and that adjacent ranges have to be internally coherent, because candidates and employees can now see both. That work almost always runs upward into senior bands.
We support Illinois employers on the compensation side of this — pay equity analysis, range architecture, and how executive pay reads inside an EPRC submission. We are not attorneys and this page is not legal advice; the filing itself is usually handled with employment counsel.
Any private employer with 100 or more employees in the State of Illinois. Government entities and political subdivisions are excluded. The count is of Illinois employees, not total company headcount, so a large national employer with a small Illinois presence may fall outside it.
Every two years after the first submission. The IDOL portal sends automated reminders 180 days and 60 days before a certificate expires, but the obligation sits with the employer whether or not the reminder is received or actioned.
The Illinois Department of Labor may impose a civil penalty or fine of up to $10,000. It can also reject applications and suspend or revoke existing certificates, and it issues notices of violation with sliding penalty scales based on how quickly the deficiency is cured. Paying a penalty does not discharge the obligation to certify.
The law requires disclosure of the pay scale and benefits, and it defines compensation to include stock options, bonuses, and other incentive-based compensation. So incentive elements are within scope, not just base salary. The benefits element can be satisfied by linking to a general benefits description on your own site.
Where an employer creates an external posting for a role that current employees could apply for as a promotion, that opportunity has to be announced, posted, or otherwise made known to all current employees within 14 days of the external posting. It is the requirement employers most often miss, because it sits in the recruiting process rather than in the job advert itself.
They can. The EPRC threshold turns on having 100 or more employees in Illinois, and HB 3129 applies to postings for positions performed at least partly in Illinois. Neither depends on where the company is headquartered.
Pay equity analysis and range architecture, sequenced so findings can be acted on rather than merely disclosed.
Tell us what you’re working through and we’ll follow up directly.