Most HR and Compensation professionals know that salary surveys and conversations about pay with peers in other organizations can violate the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Employers must avoid acting in a way that could be interpreted as trying to “fix” salaries at certain levels.

The U.S. Justice Department has published antitrust guidelines on how employers can exchange salary data and information without breaking the law. If you are a business leader, you need to know these rules.

The guidelines apply to all employers and require the following:

Compensation surveys must be managed by a third party.
HR professionals cannot conduct formal or informal salary surveys on their own.
Data must be more than 3 months old.
All the salary data employers use must be derived from at least 5 entities, and no individual entity can represent more than 25% of the data.
Any information disseminated must be aggregated so recipients cannot identify the compensation paid by a particular organization. (Do not purchase salary surveys that allow you to know what each organization is paying.)

If you want the antitrust guidelines document, send me a direct message with your email address.

And if you need a third-party to help you conduct a custom salary survey of your peers, let’s talk.

Sources: U.S. Department of Justice, SHRM

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