Can employers share salary data? The antitrust rules

The P50 team

Published October 2, 2026

Yes. Employers can share salary data through a properly run survey, and they have done so for decades. What employers cannot do is agree with each other on what to pay, or swap their current and planned wages back and forth. The line between those two things is what this article is about.

This is general information, not legal advice. If you have a specific question about your company, talk to a lawyer.

What the law actually forbids

The main federal antitrust law is section 1 of the Sherman Act. It bans agreements between competitors that restrain trade. Two companies that hire the same kinds of workers are competitors in the labor market, even if they sell different products.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) enforce this law. In October 2016 they published the Antitrust Guidance for Human Resource Professionals. In January 2025 they replaced it with the Antitrust Guidelines for Business Activities Affecting Workers. Both say the same core things:

Wage-fixing is illegal. Agreeing with another employer to set, hold, or cap pay, benefits, or other terms of employment is a violation. It does not matter if the agreement never names a dollar amount.
No-poach agreements are illegal. Agreeing with another employer not to recruit or hire each other's people is a violation.
Both can be crimes. The 2016 guidance said the DOJ "intends to proceed criminally against naked wage-fixing or no-poaching agreements." The 2025 guidelines repeat that these can be antitrust crimes.
Sharing sensitive pay information can be evidence of an agreement. Even without a formal deal, trading current or future wage details with a competitor can create civil liability if it harms competition.

In April 2025 a jury convicted a Las Vegas home health staffing executive of a wage-fixing conspiracy that affected hundreds of nurses. In November 2025 he was sentenced to 40 months in custody. The DOJ called it the department's first ever wage-fixing conviction.

Why a properly run survey is different

In a survey, nobody agrees to anything. You send your pay data to a third party. The third party combines it with data from many other employers. You get back a market picture, such as the median pay for a staff accountant across 40 companies. Then you decide on your own what to pay.

That is the opposite of wage-fixing. The agencies have said so for years. The 2016 guidance explained that a written survey of wages, salaries, or benefits is "less likely" to raise concerns when a neutral third party manages the exchange, the information is relatively old, the data is aggregated to protect the identity of the sources, and enough sources are combined that no one can link a number back to a single company.

If you are new to surveys, what is a salary survey covers the basics.

The five traditional safety-zone rules

The specific numbers come from a 1996 DOJ and FTC policy statement for health care, known as Statement 6. It created an "antitrust safety zone" for exchanges of price and compensation information. The agencies said they would not challenge a survey, absent extraordinary circumstances, if it met all five of these conditions:

Rule	What it means in practice
Managed by a third party	A consultant, trade association, academic group, or similar party runs the survey, not one of the employers
Data more than 3 months old	Participants report pay that is at least a quarter old, not today's rates or next year's plans
At least 5 participants per statistic	Every published number is built from data reported by at least five employers
No single participant above 25 percent	No one company's data makes up more than 25 percent of any statistic, on a weighted basis
Results are aggregated	Published numbers do not let anyone identify what a particular employer pays

Statement 6 was written for hospitals and doctors, but the survey industry adopted it across every sector.

What changed in 2023

The DOJ withdrew the 1993, 1996, and 2011 health care policy statements on February 3, 2023. It said the statements were "overly permissive on certain subjects, such as information sharing," and that it would move to "a case-by-case enforcement approach." The FTC withdrew the 1996 and 2011 statements on July 14, 2023, by a 3-0 vote. It also said it would evaluate conduct in health care markets "on a case-by-case basis."

So, as of October 2026, there is no formal federal safety zone for compensation surveys. What does that mean for you?

The five rules did not become illegal. They stopped being a promise that the agencies would not challenge an exchange.
The 2025 guidelines still describe the same protective features: a neutral third party, older data, aggregated results, and enough sources.
The survey industry still follows the five rules. They remain the widely used standard.

The 2025 guidelines added one newer concern. They say that "providing competitively sensitive information through an algorithm or through a third party's tool or product may also be unlawful," and that an agreement to use shared wage recommendations or calculations can be unlawful even if nobody has to follow them strictly. In plain words: routing live pay data through software does not make the exchange safe.

What to avoid in practice

Avoid	Do instead
Emailing or calling a competitor to ask what they pay a role	Join a survey and read the aggregated result
Sharing your current pay ranges or planned increases with another employer	Keep current and future pay decisions inside your company
Trading pay data at an industry meeting or in a group chat	Route all pay data through a third party that aggregates it
Using a tool that pools live wage data from several employers and suggests rates	Use surveys built on older, aggregated data, and set your own rates
Agreeing with another employer not to hire each other's people	Compete for talent on your own terms

A simple test: "We sent last year's pay file to a survey and received market percentiles" is fine. "We compared our planned 2027 raises with the hospital across town" is not.

What it means for joining a survey

Joining a properly run survey looks like this:

You send your pay data to the third party that runs the survey, not to any other employer.
The third party checks the data, combines it with data from many other employers, and holds back any result that does not have enough sources behind it.
You get back aggregated results, such as the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles for each job.
You never see a single competitor's numbers, and they never see yours.

That last point is the whole safeguard. If a survey ever showed you what one named company pays, it would not be a survey, and you should walk away from it.

The P50 rules

P50 follows the traditional practices even though the formal safety zone is gone.

P50 is run by a third party. Employers send their data to us, never to each other.
Results are published only as summaries, such as percentiles and counts.
No result is ever published for a job or cut with data from fewer than 5 companies.
Your company is never named and your data is never shown on its own. The data promise spells this out.

The methods page explains the rest, including how we weight data, how we handle outliers, and how we count participants.

Where P50 fits

Many employers avoid surveys because they worry about handing out payroll data. The antitrust rules are a reason to use a survey, not to avoid one, because a third-party survey is the lawful way to learn what the market pays. P50 was built around the five traditional rules so you can take part without guessing.

P50 is a free salary survey for employers. Registration for the 2027 survey is open now, and data collection runs March 1 to May 3, 2027. Register for free.