You can't ask. You also can't use it if they tell you anyway.
Most Philadelphia employers know they can’t ask a candidate what they currently earn. Fewer know the second half of the rule, which is where the actual exposure sits.
The Wage Equity Ordinance contains two separate prohibitions. One covers asking. The other covers using — and it applies even when a candidate volunteers the number unprompted.
The two provisions
Philadelphia passed the ordinance in January 2017, among the first jurisdictions in the country to do so. The Chamber of Commerce for Greater Philadelphia challenged it on First Amendment grounds, and a district court blocked the inquiry half in 2018 while leaving the reliance half standing.
In February 2020 the Third Circuit reversed, upholding both provisions. Enforcement began that September.
So as things stand:
You cannot ask. Not on the application, not in a screening call, not through a recruiter acting on your behalf, and not by asking a previous employer.
You cannot rely on it. You cannot use wage history to set the salary you offer — with one narrow exception, discussed below.
You cannot retaliate against an applicant who declines to answer.
The ordinance carries a private right of action.
The volunteered-information trap
Here is the situation that catches people out, and it happens constantly.
A candidate, unprompted, says: “I’m at ninety-five now, and I’m looking for something in the low hundreds.”
Nobody asked. No violation has occurred at that point. But the number is now in the room, and the moment it influences your offer, you are in the reliance provision.
The exception is narrow: wage history may be considered where the applicant knowingly and willingly disclosed it. That is a real carve-out and it is narrower than it sounds. It turns on whether the disclosure was genuinely voluntary, and the burden of demonstrating that is not the candidate’s.
The practical answer is to remove the number from the decision entirely. Decide what the role pays before you meet anyone.
Where this bites in practice
Recruiters and agencies. A third party asking on your behalf is asking. Your contracts and your briefing should say so explicitly.
Application forms. A form built for another state may carry a salary-history field. If you are hiring into Philadelphia, that form is a problem.
Applicant tracking systems. Several include a current-compensation field by default. It arrives switched on, and nobody notices.
Internal moves. The ordinance does not reach an employee’s wage history with you — their current salary is your own record. It does still reach their history with prior employers during a transfer or promotion process.
Acquisitions. In an acquisition, employees of a target company are generally not “prospective employees,” so exchanging aggregate salary information in due diligence sits outside the ordinance.
What to do instead
The ordinance is, in practice, a push toward deciding compensation on the basis of the role.
Build the range first. Benchmark the position, set a band, and go into the conversation knowing what you will pay. That is better practice regardless of jurisdiction, and it is what pay-transparency rules in other states are converging on anyway.
Ask about expectations, not history. “What are you looking for?” is a different question from “what do you make?” and it remains available to you.
Write it down. If a compensation decision is ever questioned, what helps is a contemporaneous record of the band and the reasoning. Reconstructing it afterwards is not possible.
Audit the paperwork. Application forms, ATS field configuration, recruiter briefs, interview guides. The violation is usually sitting in a form nobody has read in two years.
If you operate in more than one state
This is where it gets genuinely difficult. Salary-history bans now exist in a number of states and cities, and they are not identical — some reach contractors, some have different exceptions, some pair with pay-range disclosure requirements that pull in the opposite direction.
A single hiring process built to the strictest standard across your jurisdictions is far easier to run than parallel processes, and it is the approach we take with clients hiring in several states at once.
We work through this as part of multi-state compliance, and it sits alongside the rest of hiring and onboarding — because the form, the ATS and the recruiter brief are all part of the same problem.
This is general information, not legal advice. Wage Equity Ordinance requirements are enforced by the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, and specific situations should be reviewed with employment counsel.