Attention, Illinois Employers: The Equal Pay Registration Certificate Submission Deadline Is March 24, 2024!

Quick Hits

• Employers that had one hundred or more Illinois employees as of December 31, 2023, must obtain an Equal Pay Registration Certificate by March 24, 2024.
• Employers must count employees physically working in Illinois, as well as fully remote employees who report to management in Illinois.
• Employers are also required to submit a compliance statement, signed by an officer or executive.

The Illinois Department of Labor (IDOL) has been contacting employers with notices of a submission deadline for over a year. The IDOL is emailing these notices to the person identified on corporate filings with the Illinois secretary of state. Employers may want to confirm whether they were assigned a submission date prior to March 24, for example, by having the individual identified in the corporate filings check his or her email inbox or spam folder.

The default deadline for submission is March 24, 2024, for any employer that has not yet been contacted by the IDOL.

For EPRC purposes, employers must count employees physically working in Illinois, as well as fully remote employees who report to management in Illinois. The reporting relationship for fully remote employees might not be tracked in a company’s human resources information system (HRIS), so employers may want to carefully review remote employees to determine if they have a direct line reporting relationship to a manager or supervisor in Illinois.

Employers must take a “snapshot” of their employee count as of December 31, 2023. If an employer had more than one hundred Illinois employees as of that date, then every Illinois employee on the payroll in the calendar year 2023 must be included in the data submission. In other words, if an employer meets the one hundred employee threshold, then an employee who was hired in February 2023 and quit in October 2023, would be included in the submission.

The pay data template can be found on the EPRC webpage. The template does not typically align with fields in many HRIS and/or payroll systems, so employers may need to crosswalk a few systems or reports in order to properly query each required field.

It is worth noting that the pay data template requires separate lines of data if an employee has changed positions during the year. This may take manual intervention in order to accurately capture any position changes.

Companies that make pay adjustments at the end of the calendar year may want to ensure that these pay adjustments have been updated in the payroll system and that employees’ wages are accurately reported.

In addition to submitting the pay data template, employers must submit a compliance statement, signed by an officer or executive. The statement can also be found on the EPRC webpage.

The IDOL has provided instructions on how to access the Equal Pay Act Registration portal to upload all the required information and pay the $150 registration fee.

Finally, employers with fewer than one hundred employees working in Illinois (as defined above) that have received a notice from the IDOL with a submission deadline can submit an exemption form.

Ogletree Deakins’ Chicago office and Pay Equity Practice Group will continue to monitor developments and will publish updates on the Illinois and Pay Equity blogs as additional information becomes available.

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