Which Labor Law Posters Do You Actually Have to Hang?

That official-looking envelope on your desk — the one warning that your business faces "up to $43,000 in fines" unless you order a $90 all-in-one labor law poster today — is trying to sell you something the federal government gives away for free. Meanwhile, the actual poster requirement it gestures at is real: federal posting violations carry civil penalties that were adjusted upward for inflation in January 2025, with the priciest single federal poster now carrying a maximum fine above $26,000.

Here's the uncomfortable middle ground most small employers live in: they either overpay a vendor for posters they could have downloaded at no cost, or they hang one dusty "six-in-one" sheet from 2019 and assume they're covered in every state where they have people. Both mistakes are avoidable in an afternoon. This guide walks through which federal posters you actually owe, where the free downloads live, what changes when you operate in multiple states or with remote workers, and how to spot the poster scam that has already burned thousands of small businesses.

The Federal Posters: Six Sheets That Cover Most Employers​

The Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division publishes a free poster package covering the core federal requirements. Whether you need every sheet depends on your size and industry, but most private-sector employers with even one employee need most of these:

1. Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) — "Employee Rights Under the Fair Labor Standards Act"​

Required of virtually every employer covered by the FLSA — which, through individual coverage (any employee engaged in interstate commerce, including handling credit card transactions or emailing out of state), means essentially every business. It summarizes federal minimum wage, overtime, child labor, and tip-credit rules. Note that the DOL revised this poster in recent years, so a copy printed before 2023 is likely out of date.

2. Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA)​

Required only if you have 50 or more employees (including part-timers on payroll) within a 75-mile radius. Under-50 shops can skip this one — but if you're growing through that threshold, the posting obligation arrives with the 50th employee, not with your first leave request.

3. Job Safety and Health: "It's the Law" (OSHA)​

Required of nearly all private-sector employers. Failure to post it carries a civil penalty that rose to $16,550 under the January 2025 inflation adjustment. If your state runs its own OSHA-approved State Plan (roughly half the states do), you generally post the state version instead — more on state add-ons below.

4. "Know Your Rights: Workplace Discrimination is Illegal" (EEOC)​

Required of employers with 15 or more employees, replacing the older "EEO is the Law" poster. The EEOC has also been raising its posting penalty through inflation adjustments, so check that your copy is the current "Know Your Rights" version rather than a legacy EEO sheet.

5. Employee Polygraph Protection Act (EPPA)​

Required of most private employers and easy to forget because lie-detector testing rarely comes up in daily operations. Forgetting it is expensive: the EPPA posting penalty is the steepest of the federal set at $26,262 per violation as of the 2025 adjustment.

6. USERRA Rights Notice​

Federal law requires employers to provide notice of rights under the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act to anyone entitled to them — typically satisfied by posting the DOL's USERRA poster where employees can see it.

Two more categories apply to narrower audiences. Federal contractors and subcontractors owe additional postings — including the Notification of Employee Rights Under Federal Labor Laws notice, Davis-Bacon, Service Contract Act, and pay-transparency statements — which change more often than the standard set. And employers with migrant or seasonal agricultural workers face MSPA posting duties on top of everything above.

Where the Free Posters Live (Bookmark These)​

Every federal poster above is downloadable free of charge, in English and other languages, from the Department of Labor. Start with these two resources:

• The DOL's workplace-posters page hosts direct PDF downloads of each required poster. If you already know which sheets you owe, this is the fastest route: download, print, hang.
• The elaws FirstStep Poster Advisor is an interactive questionnaire that asks about your business — size, industry, federal-contractor status — and tells you exactly which posters apply. If you're unsure whether the FMLA or contractor sheets apply to you, run the Advisor before you print anything.

Print on standard letter or legal paper at readable size (some contractor posters specify minimum type sizes), and hang them where employees actually pass: the break room, near the time clock, or by the main entrance to the work area. A poster locked in the manager's office doesn't count — the standard is "conspicuous," meaning readily observable by employees and, for several statutes, job applicants too.

State Add-Ons: Where Multi-State Employers Get Tripped Up​

Federal posters are only half the wall. Every state layers on its own requirements, and they vary far more than the federal set:

• Workers' compensation notices are required in most states, often supplied by your comp carrier with your policy number and claims contact pre-printed. Change carriers and forget to swap the poster, and the old notice is wrong on its face.
• Unemployment insurance notices are required by most states, either as a wall poster, a handout at separation, or both. Several states require a pamphlet given to every departing employee in addition to anything on the wall.
• State wage-and-hour posters cover state minimum wage (which exceeds the federal $7.25 in most states now), payday frequency, meal-and-rest-break rules, and final-paycheck timing. These change frequently — minimum-wage adjustments alone force annual reprints in many states.
• State leave, anti-discrimination, and safety posters pile on further: paid-sick-leave notices, state civil-rights posters, pregnancy-accommodation notices, and, in State Plan states, the state OSHA poster.

The multi-state trap works like this: you open a second location, or hire your first remote employee in another state, and suddenly you owe that state's full set at that worksite. California alone requires postings on meal breaks, payday schedules, workers' comp, unemployment, paid sick leave, anti-discrimination, and more — none of which your Texas poster set covers. Minnesota's veterans-benefits poster, required since 2024 for employers with more than 50 full-time workers, is the kind of niche state rule that never appears on a generic federal sheet.

Practical rule: every physical location gets the federal set plus that state's set, and you re-check state requirements annually — state labor department poster pages are the authoritative source, and like the DOL, states provide their posters free.

Remote and Hybrid Workers: The Rules Are Stricter Than You Think​

When workforces went remote, many employers assumed emailing a PDF of the posters — or linking them on the intranet — satisfied the law. The DOL's Wage and Hour Division addressed this directly in Field Assistance Bulletin 2020-7, and the answer is narrower than most people expect.

For statutes that require continuous posting — the FLSA, FMLA, EPPA, and Section 14(c) — a one-time email or handout never suffices, because the law demands the notice be posted "at all times." Electronic posting substitutes for a physical poster only if all three conditions hold:

1. All of the employer's employees work exclusively remotely;
2. All employees customarily receive information from the employer electronically; and
3. All employees have readily available access to the electronic posting at all times.

Miss any one of those — a single hybrid worker, a warehouse crew alongside your remote staff, employees who get schedules on a break-room whiteboard — and you still owe physical posters at the worksite. For mixed workforces the DOL "encourages" doing both: physical sheets on the wall plus an always-accessible electronic version (an intranet page or shared drive visible to remote staff, not a one-off email attachment).

For notices that may be delivered individually rather than posted continuously, electronic delivery works only if the employee customarily receives information electronically and can access it. The through-line: if your remote workers live in Slack, email, and a company portal, an intranet posting hub is defensible — but only as a supplement to physical posters unless the entire workforce is remote.

State rules add another wrinkle. Several states have their own electronic-posting standards for remote workers, and they don't all track the federal three-part test. When in doubt, post both ways: the cost of an intranet page is zero, and it moots the argument.

The Poster Scam: Why You Should Never Pay for a Federal Poster​

Now back to that urgent envelope. Pitches warning of massive fines and offering a "2026 fully compliant" poster for $80–$150 — often styled to look like a government notice with a compliance deadline — are a documented scam category. One state attorney general's office alerted chambers of commerce after learning that more than 1,500 businesses in that state alone had paid for posters available free from government agencies, and sued the repeat-offender vendor behind the mailings.

Learn to recognize the pattern:

• Manufactured urgency. "Respond within 7 days to avoid penalties" from a company you've never heard of. Real agencies don't sell compliance through threatening direct mail.
• Government cosplay. Names like "Labor Law Poster Service" with eagle clip-art, official-sounding seals, and fine print disclaiming any government affiliation.
• Subscription traps. The first poster is the hook; the "annual update service" at $150+/year is the product. Federal posters change rarely — paying a yearly fee to monitor them is almost never worth it for a small employer.
• One-size-fits-all claims. A vendor that knows nothing about your headcount, industry, or states can't know which posters you need. A generic all-in-one sheet may simultaneously include posters you don't owe and omit state sheets you do.

Legitimate poster vendors exist — large multi-state employers sometimes buy consolidated state-and-federal sets for convenience — but no small business needs to pay for the federal posters, ever. They're free PDFs. The only thing worth anyone's money is the labor of tracking fifty states' changes, and even that you can do yourself once a year in less time than you'd spend vetting a vendor.

Your Annual Poster Audit (30 Minutes, Once a Year)​

Put a recurring calendar reminder on your compliance calendar and run this checklist:

1. Re-run the DOL Poster Advisor to confirm your federal set — headcount growth may have added the FMLA or EEOC sheets since last year.
2. Check each state's labor department poster page for every state where you have a worksite or remote employee. Reprint anything with a revision date newer than your wall copy.
3. Verify placement at every location: conspicuous, accessible to employees (and applicants where required), not blocked by furniture or buried behind other notices.
4. Confirm your remote-access hub still exists and is reachable — intranet reorgs quietly break these links.
5. Swap carrier-issued posters (workers' comp, and in some states disability or paid-leave notices) whenever you change insurance.
6. Log what you did. A dated checklist in your compliance file turns a future investigator's question into a one-page answer.

If the audit surfaces a gap, fix it the same day — posting violations are strict-liability items that require no showing of intent, and "we didn't know" has never been a defense.

Keep Your Compliance Records Organized​

Poster compliance is really a recordkeeping discipline in disguise: knowing what you owe, in which state, as of which date, and being able to prove it. The same habit protects you across every other employer obligation — payroll tax filings, workers' comp audits, and wage-and-hour inquiries all go better when your books and compliance files are current and complete. Beancount.io provides plain-text accounting that gives you complete transparency and control over your financial data — no black boxes, no vendor lock-in. Get started for free and keep your business records as audit-ready as your break-room wall.