Staffing agency software in Baltimore: Maryland exempts temp firms, the City licenses them, and every ad needs a pay range

Three people in Baltimore are about to have a busy Monday. The first runs the branch of a light-industrial staffing firm in a rowhouse storefront near Curtis Bay, sending about 140 people a day to warehouses around the port and the airport. On Friday one of them hurt a wrist on a client’s conveyor, two of the warehouses are in Howard County, where the minimum wage is higher, and a new client turns out to hold a contract with the City of Baltimore. Each of those facts changes what the firm owes and to whom, and the branch keeps them in a spreadsheet next to an applicant tracking system that knows none of them. The second owns a small nurse staffing agency in Towson that places nursing assistants and practical nurses in nursing homes. Every facility has its own list of what a nurse needs before the first shift, every nurse’s license comes up for renewal on a different date, and the state can ask to see the records with a day’s notice. The third is an IT recruiter in Columbia who places contract developers and cleared engineers with defense contractors along the Fort Meade corridor. Every job ad needs a pay range under Maryland law, every candidate signs a right-to-represent email before a submission, and a few of the best candidates need visas that became far more expensive in September 2025.

None of them is unusual. In 2023, Baltimore City had 91 temporary help offices with 3,677 people on their payrolls and Baltimore County 98 more with 6,044, and in 2022 the metro area’s temp firms took in $6.4 billion. What they share is that a staffing placement in Maryland is a three-sided arrangement that the law keeps splitting apart: the firm that recruits and pays the worker, the client that directs the work, and the worker, who has rights against both. State law decides whether the firm is an “employment agency” by who pays and who signs; health law licenses nurse staffing separately; a 2024 statute makes every job ad carry a pay range; the minimum wage, the sick leave, the living wage on public contracts and, from January 2027, a new family leave payroll contribution are all keyed to who the employer is and where the work happens; and federal rules split the injury log, the work authorization file and the health insurance test between the two companies in their own ways.

Very little of that is visible in the software these firms are sold. Staffing platforms were built for national firms and priced per recruiter seat, with the work that Maryland cares about, the posting record, the worksite rate table, the client-specific credential checklist, left to configuration or to a spreadsheet. At published prices, the software and screening for a modeled Baltimore firm with 150 temps on assignment cost between $27,680 and $67,318 a year, under 1% of its billing, while factoring its invoices or paying one client’s vendor management fee could cost more than all of it. None of the product and pricing pages we read advertises Maryland’s posting rules, its two health care staffing licenses or its living wage tiers, which is reasonable for a national product and is exactly the part a Baltimore firm has to get right.

This article is written for owners and managers of staffing, temp and recruiting firms in Baltimore City and Baltimore County: light industrial and warehouse, office and administrative, health care, IT and professional, and direct-hire search. It covers the local market, what staffing software costs and what its meters count, the Maryland, Baltimore City and federal rules that decide what a firm must record, a census of 45 Baltimore-area staffing websites and 80 firms across the country, how job ads get found by Google and AI assistants in 2026, a note for our readers in Lithuania, and what we would build. It is not legal advice; where we interpret a statute, we say so, and a lawyer who works with staffing firms should have the last word on your contracts.

Baltimore’s staffing market: many small branches, one very large payroll

The Census Bureau counts temp workers as employees of the staffing firm that pays them, not of the client where they work, which makes staffing one of the few industries where a storefront with four desks can have a payroll of several hundred people. In County Business Patterns for 2023, the latest year with county detail, Baltimore City had 119 employment services establishments with 4,364 employees. Most of them, 91, were temporary help services, employing 3,677 people with $175.8 million in annual payroll. Baltimore County had 98 temporary help establishments employing 6,044 people, with $299.6 million in payroll. The rest of the industry is small: 17 placement agencies in the City and 16 in the County, 4 and 17 executive search firms, and 7 and 8 professional employer organizations. The temp offices themselves are small too. In March 2023, 40 of the City’s 91 had fewer than five employees on the books, and none had 250 or more.

By the Census Bureau’s count, Baltimore is a staffing town. The City has 7.35 temporary help establishments for every 1,000 business establishments of any kind, 1.6 times the national rate of 4.58 and above Washington, D.C. (6.05) and Philadelphia County (4.51); Howard County, with the warehouses along Route 1 and Interstate 95, is close behind at 7.16. Temp jobs are not well-paid jobs: payroll per temp help employee was $47,823 in the City in 2023, 62% of the City’s average across all industries, while executive search firms in the Baltimore metro area paid $92,212 per employee.

Two caveats matter more than usual. First, most of Maryland’s temp workers have no county in these files: 65,452 of the state’s 95,149 temporary help employees, 69%, are filed under a statewide code, so the county rows mostly count branch offices and the people attached to them, not where temps actually work. Second, County Business Patterns counts only businesses with paid employees; the Census Bureau’s nonemployer statistics for 2024 add 47 employment services businesses with no paid employees in the City and 91 in the County, most of them probably independent recruiters.

The money is in temp work, not in placement fees. The 2022 Economic Census put the revenue of Baltimore City’s temporary help establishments at $631.6 million, 89% of the City’s $712.1 million in employment services revenue, against $37.5 million for placement agencies and executive search combined. Across the metro area, temporary help took in $6.4 billion. (The two Census programs count establishments differently at the county level, so their City figures should not be compared with each other.) More than half of Maryland’s $7.9 billion in temporary help revenue was booked in Anne Arundel County, which the Census Bureau does not explain; the likeliest reason is that Hanover is home to Allegis Group, the parent of Aerotek, Actalent and TEKsystems and one of the largest staffing companies in the world. Nationally, the Economic Census’s product lines show the same shape: staffing firms earned $318.7 billion from temporary staffing in 2022 and $14.2 billion from permanent placement, a ratio of about 22 to 1, plus $4.2 billion in temp-to-hire conversion fees. Health care was the largest temp line at $84.2 billion, or 25.8% of temporary help revenue, followed by industrial work at $53.4 billion and IT at $28.5 billion.

It has been a hard few years. Temporary help employment in the United States, as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics series on FRED, peaked at 3.16 million in March 2022, fell to 2.45 million in December 2025, the lowest level since January 2012 apart from the pandemic months of 2020, and stood at 2.49 million in September 2026, still 21.3% below the peak and only 0.6% above a year earlier. The American Staffing Association’s weekly staffing index, an industry estimate rather than a government count, was 3.3% above the same week of 2025 in mid-September. For a Baltimore firm the arithmetic of a slump is simple: when orders fall, the cost of each placement rises, and the firms that survive are the ones whose recruiters spend their hours recruiting rather than reconciling.

What staffing software costs, and what the meters count

Staffing software is a mature market with good products, and it is worth saying so before taking it apart. Bullhorn, which many American staffing firms have at least tried, Crelate, Recruit CRM, Zoho Recruit, Loxo and a dozen others do the core job well: parse résumés, search candidates, track submittals and keep client notes. Avionté and TempWorks go further for temp firms, running onboarding, timekeeping, payroll and invoicing in one system. A small Baltimore firm can be productive on any of them within a week.

Pricing is another matter. On October 14, 2026, we checked the pricing pages of 20 front-office staffing products. Thirteen publish at least one price, and only five, Recruit CRM, Zoho Recruit, Manatal, CATS and Top Echelon, publish every tier; the other seven of the 20 hide all of them behind a demo, and two of the pricing addresses people link to return “page not found.” The published prices run from $15 a user a month for Manatal’s entry plan, billed annually, to $215 for Recruit CRM’s top tier. Bullhorn now lists two small-agency plans, Starter at $99 and Core at $165 per user a month, with Pro, Max and the timesheet and invoicing modules quoted by sales. Zoho Recruit’s staffing edition is $25, $50 or $75 per recruiter a month on annual billing, Crelate $85 or $119, Recruiterflow $119, Loxo from $149, and BrightMove from $125 a recruiter with a back office module from $499 a month. Apart from BrightMove’s starting price, the back-office platforms built for temp staffing, the part that runs payroll and invoicing, publish nothing: Avionté’s and TempWorks’ pricing addresses redirect to their homepages, and the payroll companies most staffing firms use quote on request. Gusto is the exception, at $49 a month plus $6 a person for its simplest plan and $80 plus $12 for the plan with time tracking.

The bigger costs sit around the software and grow with headcount and billing rather than with recruiter seats. A background check from Checkr or GoodHire costs $29.99, $59.99 or $94.99 a report before court fees, an electronic Form I-9 through Checkr $7, and E-Verify nothing. Indeed publishes no list price for sponsored jobs; employers set a budget and pay for clicks or started applications. Many small staffing firms fund payroll by factoring their invoices, and factors publish rates such as 0.69% to 1.59%; one factor’s worked example charges a 1% admin fee plus 0.02% a day, $160 on a $10,000 invoice paid in 30 days. And a client that runs its contingent labor through a managed service program usually takes a fee from every supplier invoice: one program manager that runs statewide programs charged suppliers 2.6% in Rhode Island, according to a 2019 training presentation that works the example through ($97.40 to the staffing firm on a $100 bill rate), and 1.0% plus a 0.5% state fee in South Carolina, according to a 2025 supplier briefing. We found no published supplier fee for any Maryland public program.

The model uses one number we derived ourselves. The 2022 Economic Census recorded $6.41 billion in revenue and $4.41 billion in payroll for the Baltimore metro area’s temporary help establishments, so the area’s temp firms took in about $1.45 for every dollar of payroll, office staff included. Applied to the model’s $5.05 million temp payroll, that is about $7.33 million in billing. Every dollar of the software lines above could be wrong by half and the conclusion would hold: the software is the small number. For a firm that factors its invoices, the cost of waiting to be paid is larger than all of its software together, and it is a cost that better software can reduce. Under the daily fee in the factoring example above, every ten days taken out of the time between a shift and a paid invoice would save this firm about $14,658 a year, which is what accurate time approval, clean invoices and a client portal are for. Unknowns are real, too: the back-office platforms and most payroll providers do not publish prices, and the model leaves out workers’ compensation, unemployment tax and the employer’s payroll taxes, which dwarf everything in the table.

Does a staffing agency need a license in Maryland? The state says no, Baltimore City says yes

The first record a Baltimore staffing firm needs is not the candidate profile or the job order. It is a record of what the firm itself is, because Maryland sorts the industry into different rulebooks by three facts about each placement: who employs the worker, who pays the fee, and whether the job seeker signs anything. A fourth fact, whether the worker is a nurse or another licensed health practitioner, brings in two licenses run by the Maryland Department of Health. And Baltimore City, inside its own line, answers the first question the other way.

The oldest of the rulebooks is the Maryland Employment Agency Act, Title 9 of the Business Regulation Article. It defines an employment agency as a person who, “for a fee,” obtains or tries to obtain “an employee for a person who seeks an employee” or “employment for a client” (the Act’s word for a job seeker), or gives a job seeker information to help them find work, and it adds two special cases that read like a time capsule: agents who find engagements in ballet, circus, opera, radio, television or vaudeville, and recruiters who obtain an alien labor certification or immigrant visa while recruiting someone who lives outside the continental United States. Then section 9-101 takes most of the modern staffing industry back out. The Act does not cover a person who “merely” conducts “a business that directly employs individuals to provide part-time or temporary services to another person,” which is a temp firm that puts its workers on its own payroll. It does not cover a recruiter whose fee is “paid wholly by an employer,” who “does not collect money from an individual seeking employment,” and who “does not require an individual seeking employment to make a contract.” And it does not cover a nursing referral service agency licensed by the health department. Section 9-102 also leaves out charities that charge nothing beyond membership dues, unions placing their own members and employer associations finding help for theirs.

The state no longer licenses anyone under the Act. Funding to enforce it was cut in 1991, Chapter 316 of 2003 repealed the licenses for employment agencies and employment counselors, and Chapter 224 of 2013 repealed the bond; the 2013 fiscal note recorded 43 registered bonds and no complaints in the decade since the state had stopped regulating. The Department of Labor’s web page now says the Employment Agency Law was repealed in 2013, which overstates it. The definitions, the rules on job orders, advertising, fees and receipts, and a criminal penalty are all still in the Code, with no agency to register with and no one to complain to except a prosecutor. So whether a Baltimore firm is an employment agency under Maryland law depends on facts that live in its records, not on what it calls itself. A light-industrial firm that hires forklift operators onto its own payroll and bills a warehouse by the hour is outside the Act. A contingency recruiter paid by the employer is outside it too, until the moment it charges a candidate for anything or makes a candidate sign something. Whether the right-to-represent confirmation an IT recruiter asks a candidate to sign before a submission is “a contract” in that sense has not been decided; we found no court decision, attorney general opinion or agency guidance on it.

For a firm that is inside the Act, the rules are short and unusually specific, and most of them are about records. Under section 9-302, an agency may not “advertise a job for which there is no order by an employer on file,” may not send a job seeker to an employer with no order on file unless the employer has asked for regular interviews and the agency confirms the request first, or unless the agency tells the job seeker there is no order, and may not “charge a client a registration fee or collect in advance from a client a payment for service.” It may not split a fee with an employer unless it tells the job seeker, may not refer anyone to a job whose conditions break the law or to a workplace with a labor dispute, may not make a job seeker sign a promissory note or a confession of judgment, and may not try to move someone it has placed into a different job unless that person reactivates the application. Section 9-303 requires “a detailed record of” each job order from an employer and “each referral that the employment agency makes on a job order.” Section 9-304 requires a file of every job advertisement, identified by its date and the publication where it appeared, the agency’s name on every advertisement and every piece of promotional material, and the word “agency” in each advertisement. Every form the agency uses must say that it is an employment agency, and every contract with a job seeker must state the fee (section 9-305).

The fee rules have their own clock. If a placed worker is let go through no fault of their own, or quits with just cause, within 90 days of starting, the agency may charge only a temporary placement fee of the lesser of 20% of what the worker earned or 75% of the permanent fee; if the worker is fired for cause or quits without one, the cap is 75% of the permanent fee (section 9-306). When a placed worker earns no more than the minimum wage, the agency may not collect more than 20% of its fee from any one paycheck (section 9-307). If an agency sent a job seeker to an interview for a job it had no order for without saying so, it must repay the travel costs within 24 hours of being asked (section 9-308). Every fee payment needs a receipt with the job seeker’s name, the date, the amount and the balance still due (section 9-309). A violation of any of it is a misdemeanor, with a fine of up to $1,000, a year in prison, or both (section 9-401).

Read as a database, the Act describes three tables and two foreign keys. There is a job order table; every advertisement row must point to an order that existed on the day the ad ran, and must carry its date and the place it ran; every referral row must point to an order too, or to an employer’s standing request for interviews with a confirmation logged before the job seeker was sent, or to a note that the job seeker was told there was no order. A firm that keeps those three things in three different places, an applicant tracking system for orders, a job board for ads and a recruiter’s inbox for referrals, cannot easily show that the links exist.

Baltimore City still licenses employment agencies, temp firms included

Inside the City line the answer to the first question flips. Article 15, Subtitle 7 of the Baltimore City Code defines an employment agency much as the state does, and then, where the state’s law excludes temp firms, the City’s expressly includes “any person conducting a business which consists of employing individuals directly for the purpose of furnishing part-time or temporary help to others.” It also includes firms whose fee is paid entirely by the employer and that collect nothing from applicants, and leaves out only the firm that “merely” does that and “does not require an individual seeking employment to make a contract,” the same contract test the state uses. Under section 7-2, “no person shall carry on the business of an employment agency without first obtaining a license,” issued annually for $250 by the Director of Consumer Protection and Business Licensing, a post the City created in 2025. Section 7-3 adds that each licensee must register its full name and address “during the 1st week of January in each year” and display on the front of its building a sign with its name and the words “Licensed Employment Agency.” We could not find a current application page for the license, and we do not know how actively it is enforced; a firm opening an office in the City should ask the department before it signs a lease, and a firm with an existing office should check whether it holds one.

The City has one more rule written specifically for temp firms, and it is more than fifty years old. Under Article 11, section 12-2, adopted in 1972, a business “directly employing individuals for the purpose of furnishing temporary full-time or part-time help to others” may not “knowingly supply persons to perform labor in place of an employee involved in an authorized strike or work stoppage after the inception of said strike or work stoppage,” except for security or maintenance workers needed to protect life, health and property. A violation is a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $500, up to a year in jail, or both. For software, that is a flag on the client record: a work stoppage at a client in the City should stop new orders for the affected roles until someone has looked at them.

Two more licenses for health care staffing

Nurse and caregiver staffing has its own rulebooks, and they are stricter. A “health care staff agency” is any business that refers licensed practical nurses, registered nurses, certified nursing assistants or practitioners in an allied health field, “as employees or independent contractors,” to give temporary care at a hospital or a related institution such as a nursing home. It must be licensed by the Office of Health Care Quality before the first referral. The statute excludes a staffing pool that a facility runs for itself and its affiliates, a licensed home health agency and practitioners who place themselves, and its definition of a practitioner leaves out physicians, nurse practitioners, nurse anesthetists, nurse midwives, pharmacists, dentists, podiatrists and acupuncturists. Since a 2018 law, the statute sets no license fee and no renewal term, and the Office’s current application says there is no fee to apply, although the regulation, COMAR 10.07.03, still describes an annual license. An agency may not even use the words “health care staff agency” in its advertising before it is licensed.

What the license buys is a set of duties that look like an applicant tracking system with a regulator’s fields. Before a nurse is first referred, the agency must verify the license; when the nurse’s license comes up for renewal, it must send the Office the nurse’s name and license number and verify the status again. It must report anything a referred practitioner does that might be grounds for discipline to the licensing board and to the Office, and must notify the Office of a change of name, owner or address within 30 days or face a $100 fine. Section 19-2002 lists ten procedures an inspector will check, and several of them borrow the client’s rules rather than the state’s: health status, testing and immunizations “as required or requested by the client facility,” drug screening before the first referral “if the client facility requires drug screening for facility employees,” and criminal background checks before the first referral “if the client facility requires criminal background checks for facility employees.” The regulation adds that the agency must keep each client’s job descriptions, a documented way of matching a practitioner’s qualifications to an assignment, and proof that each practitioner was taught the facility’s policies and their duty under Maryland law to report abuse and neglect. When the Office asks for records, the responsible party has 24 hours to produce them, and civil money penalties run up to $2,500 for a first offense, $5,000 for a second and $10,000 for a third or later one, per violation or per day until the problem is fixed.

The software consequence is that a health care staffing firm cannot keep a single screening checklist. Its checklist is a function of the client: one nursing home requires a drug screen and a background check for its own employees, so every nurse the agency sends there needs both before the first shift; the hospital across town requires a different set of immunizations; a third client requires neither. The record that proves compliance is the intersection of the nurse’s file and the facility’s policy on the date of the first referral, kept so that it can be printed within a day. It is not a niche: the Office’s licensee directories, in files dated October 2, 2026, list 2,145 health care staff agencies, 439 of them based outside Maryland and, by the Office’s own jurisdiction field, 515 in Baltimore County and 113 in Baltimore City. That is more than three times the 688 temporary help establishments the Census Bureau counted in the whole state, probably because a license costs nothing and many licensees are one-person or out-of-state operations. Several app-based shift platforms appear on the list under their operating companies, among them IntelyCare, ConnectRN and Trusted Health; Maryland has published no guidance on whether such platforms must be licensed, but those platforms have evidently decided that they should be.

A nursing referral service agency is the home care version: a business that screens licensed health professionals or caregivers and refers them to clients who ask for nursing, home health aide or other home health care services. It may work through independent contractors, and its contracts may say that it pays the caregivers nothing. Before any referral, section 19-4B-03 requires a state criminal history check through the Central Repository with two sets of fingerprints, or a private background check covering every state where the person lived or worked in the past seven years; license verification; a basic health screening that includes tuberculosis; checks of references and employment history; completed I-9 forms; and an in-person interview. The agency must run a complaint process, give clients the health department’s complaint hotline, and let clients “accept or reject, at their discretion,” anyone it refers. COMAR 10.07.07 still lists a $1,000 fee for a three-year license, but the 2018 law removed the fee and the term from the statute and the Office’s 2026 application says there is no fee. Operating without a license is a misdemeanor with fines of up to $1,000 for a first offense and $10,000 for each later one, every day counting as a new offense after the first conviction. The directories list 391 of these agencies, 85 in Baltimore County and 25 in the City.

Every job ad is a regulated document

For a staffing firm, the job ad is the storefront, the product listing and the top of the sales funnel at once, and since October 1, 2024, it has also been a regulated document in Maryland. Chapter 272 of 2024 rewrote section 3-304.2 of the Labor and Employment Article so that for any position that “will be physically performed, at least in part, in the State,” an employer must “disclose in each public or internal posting for each position the wage range and a general description of benefits and any other compensation offered for the position.” If there was no posting, the same information must be given to the applicant before anyone talks about pay, and again whenever the applicant asks. The range must be set in good faith, and section 3-301 defines it as the minimum and maximum hourly rate or salary, set by reference to a pay scale, an earlier range for the job, what people in comparable jobs earn or the budget. Section 3-304.2 also bars an employer from asking about a candidate’s pay history, or relying on it, before making an offer.

Two definitions in section 3-301 bring staffing firms squarely inside the law. A “posting” is “a solicitation intended to recruit applicants for a specific available position, including recruitment done directly by an employer or indirectly through a third party,” and an “employer” includes “a person who acts directly or indirectly in the interest of another employer with an employee.” On our reading, a temp firm advertising its own temp jobs is the employer, and a recruiter advertising a client’s job is recruiting for that employer indirectly; either way the ad needs the range. The Maryland Department of Labor’s wage range FAQ agrees: the law covers postings “by or on behalf of the employer, including job recruiters or job listing websites such as Indeed, LinkedIn or Monster,” although an employer is not responsible for copies that a third-party site scrapes without its consent. The same FAQ answers three questions every staffing ad raises. A single fixed rate is allowed, so “$30 an hour” complies, but “$30+ an hour” does not. “Any other compensation” includes differentials, premium pay, commissions and bonuses, which are exactly the shift differentials and sign-on bonuses staffing ads lead with. And “an advertised range of pay must be for a single position and a single location”: an ad for warehouse associates in Baltimore, Glen Burnie and Columbia needs a separate range for each location, and every repost counts as a new posting.

The law also creates a record. Under section 3-305, an employer must keep a record of compliance “for each position for at least 3 years after” the position is filled or, if it is never filled, after it was first posted. Enforcement starts gently and then counts people: under section 3-308, the Commissioner of Labor and Industry orders compliance and may send a letter for a first violation, may assess up to $300 “for each employee or applicant for employment for whom the employer is not in compliance” for a second, and up to $600 per person for each later violation within three years. For a firm that posts the same warehouse job on four boards and receives 300 applications, the arithmetic of a per-applicant penalty is the reason to treat the posting as a record rather than as marketing copy.

A staffing firm’s posting record therefore needs more fields than a job board form usually asks for: the order or requisition the ad belongs to, the worksite, because Maryland’s rule turns on whether the work is physically performed in the state, the wage range with its unit, the general description of benefits, any other compensation such as shift differentials, per diems, overtime expectations or a conversion bonus, every channel where the ad ran and on which dates, the day the position was filled, and an archived copy of what the ad said on each of those days. Most of that already exists somewhere in a staffing firm’s systems. What usually does not exist is the link between them, so that three years later the firm can show what a particular applicant was told about pay.

Public money adds a waiting period. Baltimore City’s local hiring law applies to City contracts worth more than $300,000 and to City-subsidized projects over $5 million, and says that “all new jobs needed for the contract or project must be posted through MOED,” the Mayor’s Office of Employment Development, “for a period of 7 days before being publically advertised,” with at least 51% of the new jobs filled by City residents. Contractors report each new hire’s name, Social Security number, job title, hire date, residence and referral source every month, by the fifth business day, through the City’s online portal, and the City’s regulations extend the program to subcontractors “regardless of the subcontractor award amount.” Whether a staffing firm that supplies a City contractor counts as a subcontractor is a question for the Mayor’s office, and we have not seen it answered in writing; a firm that wants that business should at least be able to hold an ad for seven days, record where each hire lives and report it by the fifth.

A real opening behind the ad

Staffing firms advertise ahead of demand. “Always hiring warehouse associates” and “join our talent community” ads collect applicants before a client calls, which is how a branch fills 40 orders on a Monday morning. Three different rulebooks are wary of that habit, each for its own reason. For a firm that is an employment agency under Maryland’s Act, advertising “a job for which there is no order by an employer on file” is one of the listed prohibitions, as described above. Google, which reads job ads more widely than anyone, says in its job posting guidelines that publishers “may solicit resume collections for open positions only” and that it may remove solicitations that collect candidate data but are not currently hiring; it also does not allow expired postings, and asks sites either to take them down or to mark them with a closing date in the past. And Maryland’s pay-range law is written around a “specific available position,” which on our reading means that the firm that recruits through a general pipeline ad still owes the range to each applicant before any conversation about pay.

None of this forbids a pipeline. It means the pipeline should be honest about what it is, the jobs should carry their own ads with their own ranges, and the system should close an ad when the order closes, on the job board, in the site’s structured data and in the search engines’ index. In our census of Baltimore-area staffing websites, described below, three quarters of the Maryland postings we sampled showed a wage, but local firms’ postings did so only about half the time, and six used open-ended figures such as “up to” or a number with a plus sign.

When you may ask about a record, a credit history or a face

Staffing is a screening business, and in Baltimore the screening order is set by the worksite. Maryland’s statewide rule, the Criminal Record Screening Practices Act, applies to employers with 15 or more full-time employees and says they may not, “at any time before the first in-person interview,” require an applicant to disclose a criminal record or criminal accusations. A first violation gets an order to comply; later ones can cost up to $300 for each applicant affected under section 3-1505. Baltimore City’s own Fair Criminal-Record Screening Practices ordinance, Article 11, Subtitle 15 of the City Code, goes further and starts earlier. It covers any employer with 10 or more full-time equivalent employees in the City, and before “a conditional offer of employment has been extended” the employer may not ask the applicant about a criminal record, may not “conduct a criminal-record check on the applicant,” and may not ask anyone else about one. A conditional offer is one conditioned “solely” on the record check or on “some other contingency expressly communicated to the applicant at the time of the offer.”

The City ordinance was written with staffing in mind. Its definition of employment includes “contractual, temporary, seasonal, or contingent work” and “work through the services of a temporary or other employment agency.” It does not apply where federal, state or City law requires or expressly authorizes the inquiry, or to an employer that provides programs, services or direct care to minors or to adults who cannot provide for their own daily needs. An aggrieved applicant can complain to the Baltimore Community Relations Commission, which can award back pay, reinstatement, damages for humiliation and emotional distress, job-search expenses and attorney’s fees, and a violation is also a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $500, up to 90 days in jail, or both, for each offense.

Put the two rules next to each other and the same applicant gets two different processes on the same morning. A forklift order at a warehouse in Baltimore County can include the criminal-record question at the first in-person interview, or earlier if the firm is below the state threshold, while the same firm filling the same job a mile away inside the City line must wait until it has extended a conditional offer and recorded what the offer was conditioned on, and may not even order the background check before then. A nurse aide order at a nursing home in the City may fall under the exception for facilities that care for vulnerable adults, and the health care staff agency rules described above will require a background check before the first referral anyway if the home requires one for its own staff. Much of high-volume staffing now happens on a phone, with no in-person interview at all, which on our reading leaves the statewide rule without an obvious point at which the question becomes allowed. A screening workflow that asks the same questions in the same order everywhere is wrong somewhere.

Credit checks have their own rule. Under Maryland’s Job Applicant Fairness Act, an employer may not use a credit report or credit history to deny employment, to fire someone or to set pay, unless the applicant already has an offer and the report is used for some other purpose, or the employer has a bona fide purpose that is “substantially job-related” and “disclosed in writing to the employee or applicant.” The statute lists the kinds of jobs that qualify: managerial positions, jobs with access to customers’ or employees’ personal information beyond an ordinary retail transaction, jobs with fiduciary duties such as issuing payments or collecting debts, jobs with an expense account or a company card, and jobs with access to trade secrets or other confidential business information. Banks, credit unions and registered investment advisers are exempt, and so is any employer that another law requires to check credit. The penalties are modest, up to $500 for a first violation and $2,500 for a repeat, but for a staffing firm that sends accounts payable clerks, IT administrators and warehouse pickers through the same background-check vendor, the point is that the package ordered must depend on the job, and the written statement of purpose must exist before the report is used.

The newest screening tools have a rule too. Since 2020, section 3-717 has barred an employer from using a facial recognition service to create a facial template during a job interview unless the applicant signs a waiver that states, in plain language, the applicant’s name, the date of the interview, that the applicant consents to facial recognition during the interview, and whether the applicant read the waiver. A video interview platform that analyzes faces needs that waiver as a record tied to the interview. No Maryland statute goes further yet. Bills to regulate automated employment decision tools in 2024, high-risk artificial intelligence systems in 2025 and surveillance-based wage setting in 2026 all died after a committee hearing.

Federal law sits on top of all of it. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, an employer that orders a background report must first give a clear disclosure “in a document that consists solely of the disclosure” and get written authorization, and before taking adverse action based on the report must give the applicant a copy of it and a written summary of their rights. In May 2025 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau withdrew dozens of guidance documents, among them its advisory opinion on background screening and its guidance on name-only matching, which changes what the regulator says about the law but not the statute. For a Baltimore City order, the result is a fixed sequence: a conditional offer, recorded with what it is conditioned on; the standalone disclosure and the authorization; only then the check; and, if the report leads to a rejection, the copy of the report and the summary of rights before the decision becomes final. Each step is a timestamp, and the software should refuse to take them out of order.

The worksite and the contract set the pay floor

A staffing firm’s pay rate is not a property of the worker or of the job title. In the Baltimore area it is a function of three things: the county where the work is done, how many people the firm employs, and whether the client is spending public money. Maryland’s minimum wage is $15.00 an hour, but Howard, Montgomery and Prince George’s counties set their own, and the City, the State and the federal government each set a higher floor for work done under their service contracts. A temp who drives a forklift for a private client in Curtis Bay on Monday, in Columbia on Wednesday and for a City service contractor on Friday has three different legal minimums in one week.

Two of those rows are easy to get wrong in software. Baltimore City’s living wage law makes 8 hours “a regular work day for every individual working directly for any service contractor or subcontractor,” and requires overtime of at least one and a half times the regular rate “for all hours worked in excess of 8 hours in any work day, or 40 hours in any work week.” Daily overtime is rare in American payroll, and on our reading a staffing firm that sends a temp to a City service contractor for a ten-hour shift owes two hours of overtime that its payroll system, set up for the federal 40-hour week, will not calculate on its own. The same subtitle requires the contractor, and through it each subcontractor, to file project payroll reports within 14 days of the end of each pay period, listing each worker’s classification and “the number of hours worked daily” at straight time and at overtime, with a signed statement that the rates are correct. An underpaid worker is owed restitution, and the contractor owes the City $50 a day for each employee so underpaid. The City raised the rate to $17.17 on July 1, 2026, and now adjusts it each year by the regional consumer price index. Montgomery County’s tiers are the other trap: the county sets its minimum by the size of the employer, and on our reading a staffing firm’s headcount includes every temp on its payroll, so even a small agency with a single Bethesda client is likely to owe the large-employer rate. The State’s living wage has a clause that reads as if it were written for staffing: under section 18-102 of the State Finance and Procurement Article, it covers an employee who spends “at least one-half of the employee’s time during any workweek” on a State service contract, but not one who “works less than 13 consecutive weeks” on the contract and works full time during that period. Whether a given temp is owed $17.54 can therefore depend on a week-by-week count of hours on the contract and on how long the assignment has run, which is a calculation, not a setting. The federal row works differently again. The Service Contract Act’s wage determination for Baltimore City and the surrounding counties, number 2015-4265, revised on August 22, 2026, sets a separate rate for each occupation and adds $5.92 an hour in health and welfare benefits on top, up to 40 hours a week, or $5.42 on contracts that also carry the federal paid sick leave order. The broader federal contractor minimum wage of Executive Order 14026 is gone: it was revoked by Executive Order 14236 on March 14, 2025, and the Department of Labor no longer enforces it.

Pay statements carry the consequences. Under section 3-504, as rewritten by Chapter 305 of 2024, a Maryland employer must give each employee, at hiring, written notice of the rate of pay, the regular paydays and the leave benefits, and with each pay, a statement showing the employer’s name as registered with the state, its address and telephone number, the pay period, the hours worked, “the rates of pay,” gross and net pay, every deduction by name and any additional bases of pay; since October 2024 the Commissioner can fine up to $500 for each employee who did not get one. The Department’s pay stub FAQ adds two details that matter to staffing: the statement must name the employer, not the payroll processor, with its legal suffix such as LLC, and because “there can be multiple employers for a single employee,” a joint employment arrangement may call for more than one name. The law also requires notice “at least 1 pay period in advance” of any change in a payday or wage, while allowing raises without notice. On our reading, a temp moved from a $17.17 City-contract assignment to a $15.00 private one has had a wage change that deserves that notice, which is one more reason to keep each assignment’s rate, and the date the worker was told about it, as data.

Sick leave depends on who supervises the temp

Maryland’s Healthy Working Families Act gives covered employees at least one hour of sick and safe leave for every 30 hours worked, paid if the employer has 15 or more employees and unpaid below that. It counts every employee toward that threshold “without regard to whether the employee is a full-time, part-time, temporary, or seasonal employee,” so a staffing firm with ten people in its office and a hundred on assignment is a large employer. Whether the temps themselves accrue leave is a harder question, and the statute answers it with a fact most staffing systems do not record. Section 3-1301 says “employee” does not include someone “employed by a temporary services agency to provide temporary staffing services to another person if the temporary services agency does not have day-to-day control over the work assignments and supervision of the individual,” nor someone “directly employed by an employment agency to provide part-time or temporary services to another person.” The Department of Labor’s FAQ says only that “certain employees of a temporary services agency” are excluded.

The two clauses do not sit easily together. The second borrows almost word for word the phrase that Maryland’s Employment Agency Act uses to say a business is not an employment agency, a business that “directly employs individuals to provide part-time or temporary services to another person.” Read with that Act’s definition, the second clause excludes almost no one and the first clause, the day-to-day control test, decides; read in the everyday sense of “employment agency,” the second clause would exclude almost every temp and make the first one pointless. We have found no court decision or written guidance that settles it. What is clear is that the legislature expected some agency temps to be covered, because section 3-1303 grants an exemption for as-needed health care workers who can turn down shifts only to workers who are “not employed by a temporary staffing agency.” A per diem nurse in a hospital’s own pool may have no right to sick leave, while the same nurse booked through an agency that schedules and directs the work does.

For software, that makes “who assigns the work and supervises it day to day” a field on every assignment, set from the client contract and checked against what actually happens on site, and, as the next section shows, the same field decides who logs an injury. Where leave is owed, the rest is arithmetic the law spells out. An employer may cap accrual at 40 hours a year, use at 64 and the balance at 64, may make new employees wait 106 calendar days before using leave, and may skip accrual in pay periods with very few hours. It must show the available balance with each pay, or in an online system, keep records of leave accrued and used for three years, and, if it rehires someone “within 37 weeks after leaving,” reinstate the unused balance they had when they left. Temps leave and come back all the time, so the balance has to survive the gap between assignments with a 37-week clock attached to each departure. A firm that cannot produce accurate records faces a rebuttable presumption that it broke the law, and the Commissioner can assess up to $1,000 for each employee not in compliance.

A new payroll line in January 2027

Maryland’s Family and Medical Leave Insurance program adds a payroll contribution from January 1, 2027. The Department of Labor reaffirmed the total rate at 0.9% of wages in April 2026, says employers may withhold up to half of it, 0.45%, from employees’ pay, and requires quarterly wage and hour reports; employers with fewer than 15 employees remit only the employee half. The 15-employee count includes employees inside and outside Maryland, is made quarter by quarter at first and then as an average of the four quarters of the previous year, and, as with sick leave, a staffing firm’s temps count. The first payment, covering wages paid from January through March 2027, is due on April 30, 2027; benefits of up to $1,000 a week for up to 12 weeks become available on January 1, 2028, to workers with 680 hours of Maryland work in the four completed quarters before the claim. Because those hours are counted from the wage and hour reports, a temp’s eligibility will be computed from the staffing firm’s own filings, and a firm that reports hours carelessly will hear about it from its workers first. For a firm with a weekly payroll of $250,000, 0.9% is $2,250 a week, about $117,000 a year, of which up to half can come from the workers; whether the firm passes its own share on to clients through the bill rate is a pricing decision that has to be made, and written into client contracts, before the first quarter closes.

When an assignment ends

The end of an assignment is a regulated moment too. Under a Maryland unemployment insurance regulation, COMAR 09.32.02.07-2, a “temporary help firm,” one that “assigns its own employees to perform services for clients on a nonpermanent basis,” can have a former temp treated as not actively seeking work in the first week of a claim if two things are true: the firm “advised the claimant in writing before the end of the claimant’s most recent work assignment that failure to request a new work assignment” could delay or deny benefits, and it can show, with “contemporaneous documentation prepared in the ordinary course of business, for example, a telephone log,” that the worker did not ask for another assignment. The worker can still show that a request was made or that there was good cause. Most firms already make the phone call; few can prove, months later and for a specific worker, that the written warning went out before the assignment ended and that no request came in afterward. Both are records a system can keep without anyone thinking about them. Unemployment tax itself is unremarkable in Maryland, with rates from 0.30% to 7.50% on the first $8,500 of each worker’s wages in 2026, but a staffing firm’s rate follows its claims history, so the log is worth money.

Daily pay became a regulated product

Same-day and daily pay are common recruiting promises in light-industrial staffing, although only one of the 45 Baltimore sites we read mentioned them, and Maryland regulated them in 2025. Chapter 847 of 2025, which took effect on October 1, 2025, treats earned wage access, whether offered by an app the worker finds alone or through a provider the employer contracts with, as a loan under the Maryland Consumer Loan Law. A provider must be licensed or exempt, may charge no more than $5.00 for an advance of $75 or less and $7.50 for a larger one, must offer at least one way to get the money at no cost, and may not “share with an employer any fees, tips, or other charges received from a consumer.” Providers must also report to the Office of Financial Regulation by July 1 each year, starting in 2026, and from October 1, 2026, Chapter 170 of 2026 bars them from soliciting or charging tips at all. The market has adjusted: one national provider’s help center now says that in Maryland, New York and South Carolina it offers only payout methods with no fee. The law’s definition of a provider excludes “an employer that offers a portion of salary, wages, or other compensation directly to its employees” before payday, so a staffing firm that runs its own daily payroll is paying wages, not making loans. For software, the choice is between building daily pay into the payroll the firm already runs, with its own costs and timekeeping cut-offs, and integrating a licensed provider whose fees the firm cannot share; both are legitimate, and the second is the one that changed in 2025.

One temp, two employers: how federal law splits the file

Federal law treats a staffing placement as two employers sharing one worker, and it divides the paperwork between them by asking, again and again, the same question Maryland’s sick leave law asks: who supervises this person day to day? The answer moves the injury log, much of the joint-employment exposure and some of the health insurance arithmetic. The staffing firm keeps the files that follow the worker from client to client, and the client keeps the ones tied to its own workplace.

The injury goes on the supervisor’s log

OSHA’s recordkeeping rule, 29 CFR 1904.31, requires an employer to record injuries to workers who are not on its payroll “if you supervise these employees on a day-to-day basis,” and tells the two companies to coordinate “to make sure that each injury and illness is recorded only once.” OSHA’s temporary worker bulletin on recordkeeping says that in most cases the host employer is the one responsible for recording, and a 2014 policy memo warns that a contract’s division of duties “may not discharge either party’s obligations” and that OSHA “will consider issuing citations to either or both of the employers.” The clocks are short. A recordable case must be entered within seven calendar days, a death reported to OSHA within eight hours and an in-patient hospitalization, amputation or loss of an eye within 24, and the records are kept for five years. Temporary help services are not among the industries that must send detailed case data to OSHA electronically, but many of their clients are: warehouses, hospitals and nursing homes with 100 or more employees submit their injury forms each year, including the cases of the temps they supervise.

For the staffing firm, the practical record is a handoff. When a temp is hurt, someone has to establish within days who supervised the work, tell the client in writing that the case belongs on its log if it does, keep the workers’ compensation claim, which in Maryland usually runs through the staffing firm’s insurer, moving in parallel, and make sure the case lands on exactly one log. The same “day-to-day supervision” field that decides sick leave decides this, which is a good argument for keeping it as data on the assignment rather than as a clause in a contract nobody rereads.

The staffing firm owns the I-9

Work authorization is the staffing firm’s file. Under 8 CFR 274a.1, for contract labor “the term employer shall mean” the contractor, not the business using the labor, and USCIS’s I-9 Central says plainly that “the agency completes Form I-9 for each worker they provide to your company.” The form must be kept for three years after the date of hire or one year after employment ends, whichever is later, which for a temp who works three assignments over two years is a calculation, not a date. A worker whose employment with the agency continues between assignments needs no new form; one rehired within three years can be reverified on the existing form’s supplement. Firms enrolled in E-Verify may examine documents remotely over live video, under a procedure available since August 2023.

The work-authorization file has also become more active. Automatic extensions of many expiring employment authorization documents ended for renewals filed on or after October 30, 2025, and the final rule making that permanent takes effect today, October 14, 2026. Since August 11, 2026, E-Verify’s Status Change Report, updated every two weeks, has flagged more categories of employment authorization that the government has ended, and employers must reverify those workers rather than open new cases. And E-Verify will dispose of cases last updated on or before December 31, 2016, on January 11, 2027, so a firm that wants those records must download them first. For a staffing firm with thousands of current and former workers, each of those is a report to run on a schedule, not a memo to remember.

Who else is the employer

The joint-employer question is being rewritten in 2026, mostly in the direction staffing clients wanted. The National Labor Relations Board’s 2023 rule was vacated in 2024, and a final rule published on February 27, 2026, restored the 2020 standard, under which a client is a joint employer only if it holds “substantial direct and immediate control” over essential terms of employment. The Department of Labor proposed its own joint-employer rule under the Fair Labor Standards Act on April 23, 2026; it asks whether a business hires or fires, supervises and controls schedules or conditions, sets pay, and keeps employment records, and its staffing examples are worth reading. A client that closely supervises temps and uses “sophisticated analysis of expected customer demand to continuously adjust the number of workers it requests and the specific hours” is a joint employer in the proposal; a client that pays a fixed fee per shift while the agency sets pay and schedules is not. The comment period closed in June, and no final rule had been published by October 14. The department has also stopped applying its 2024 independent contractor rule in its own investigations and proposed in February 2026 to replace it. For a staffing firm, the useful lesson is that the evidence in all of these tests is operational data: who set the schedule, who changed the headcount, who approved the hours. A client portal that records those decisions records the joint-employment facts too.

Health insurance has its own staffing rules. Under the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate, a staffing firm that measures hours to decide who is full time must look at factors written for temporary staffing, such as whether workers may turn down placements, have periods with no offers and typically get assignments of 13 weeks or less; a worker can be treated as a new hire only after a break of at least 13 consecutive weeks, and an anti-abuse rule ignores hours arranged to dodge that test. Coverage offered by the staffing firm counts as the client’s offer only if the client pays a higher fee for workers who enroll. For 2026, the affordability threshold is 9.96% of household income and the penalties are $3,340 and $5,010 per full-time employee, rising in 2027 to 10.22%, $3,780 and $5,670.

IT staffing and the H-1B year

The Fort Meade corridor makes IT staffing a large part of Baltimore’s market, and no corner of staffing changed faster in the past year. A September 19, 2025, proclamation restricted entry of new H-1B workers unless the petition was accompanied by a $100,000 payment; USCIS applied it to petitions filed from September 21, 2025, for workers outside the United States without a valid H-1B visa, not to changes of status or extensions granted inside the country. A second proclamation, on September 18, 2026, extended it to September 21, 2027, named “information technology (IT) staffing and outsourcing firms” as abusers of the program, and reported that the largest of them had cut their combined H-1B registrations from 24,946 to 2,055, while the payment had been made for over 700 petitions. The courts have not settled it. A federal court in Massachusetts vacated the agencies’ implementing policies in June 2026, and on September 30, 2026, in a case brought partly by a nurse staffing agency, a federal court in California vacated them again and barred enforcement until the agencies go through notice-and-comment rulemaking; the government appealed on October 9. Meanwhile the Department of Homeland Security has proposed a $103,265 fee on every cap-subject petition, and since February 2026 the H-1B lottery has been weighted by wage level, with a level IV wage entered four times and a level I wage once, and an agent placing a worker in several positions must use the lowest level among them.

The older rules are the ones a small IT staffing firm is most likely to trip on, and they are records. A labor condition application must be posted for ten days at each worksite, or electronically, and a public access file with the application, the wage rate and how it was set must be ready within one working day of filing. An H-1B-dependent employer that places a worker with another employer must ask, under 20 CFR 655.738, whether the client has displaced or will displace a U.S. worker within 90 days before or after the placement, a rule whose own example is “an information technology staffing firm under contract with a bank,” and the firm stays liable if the client does displace someone. And an H-1B worker on the bench between projects must still be paid. A firm that keeps these files in email will not find them on the day the Department of Labor asks.

One federal question did resolve. The Federal Trade Commission’s nationwide ban on noncompete agreements never took effect; the commission dropped its appeals in September 2025 and removed the rule from the Code of Federal Regulations in February 2026. Maryland’s own ban is narrower and still in force: under section 3-716 of the Labor and Employment Article, a noncompete is void for anyone earning no more than 150% of the state minimum wage, $22.50 an hour today, and for licensed health care workers giving direct patient care who earn $350,000 a year or less. Most temps and most staffed nurses fall inside one of those groups, so a staffing firm’s worker agreements should not lean on a clause Maryland will not enforce.

What 45 Baltimore staffing websites show job seekers, and machines

On October 14, 2026, we read the public websites of the staffing, temp and recruiting firms with offices in Baltimore City and Baltimore County. The frame came from a public directory’s Baltimore and Towson pages, a marketplace’s list of Baltimore staffing firms, a handful of web searches, and a seeded random sample from the state’s list of licensed health care staff agencies: 69 firms in all, 30 of them national or regional chains with a local branch and 39 local firms. We left out 14 that we could not tie to a Baltimore-area office, and 10 more could not be read, which leaves 45 readable sites: 16 chains and 29 local firms, 8 of them in health care. For every site we read the homepage, the jobs page, the branch page where there was one, robots.txt and llms.txt; for every job board we sampled up to five open postings located in Maryland, 87 postings from 22 firms in all. We record the names in our data, but we report shortcomings only in aggregate and name firms only when they do something well.

The first finding is about the frame itself. Ten of the 39 local firms listed in Baltimore directories had no staffing website we could read: four domains were expired, for sale or parked, three did not respond, one blocked automated requests and two now belonged to a different business. Of the 45 readable sites, 13 listed no jobs at all, only an application form, a contact form or a promise to call; about half of the local firms’ sites, against 15 of the 16 chains’, had a public job board with listings. Health care staffing is the most fragmented corner. Of the 628 health care staff agency licenses that the state lists at Baltimore City or Baltimore County addresses, 101 are in Owings Mills alone, and two thirds of the licensees give a free webmail address as their contact, 319 of them on Gmail, while only about a quarter use a domain of their own.

Where there were postings, three quarters showed pay. Of the 87 Maryland postings, 65 showed a wage, 37 as a range and 28 as a single figure, and the other 22 offered at most “competitive pay.” The gap between chains and local firms was the sharpest result in the census: 40 of the chains’ 41 postings showed a wage, against 25 of the local firms’ 46. Counted by firm, every sampled posting showed a wage at 15 of the 22 firms, none did at 3, and only 5 firms gave a true range on every posting we read. Six of the single figures were open-ended, “up to,” “starting at” or a number with a plus sign, which is the form the Department of Labor’s FAQ says does not satisfy the law. Many postings carried the facts a record needs: 64 showed a date and 41 a job order or requisition number, 38 both. None of the 87 was an evergreen “always hiring” ad, although eight boards carried talent-pool boilerplate and two postings dated from 2024 were still live.

The machine-readable picture was weaker than the human one. Job-posting markup appeared on 56 of the 87 postings, but on only 43 of them in the page as served; the other 13 had it only after JavaScript ran. The salary was in the markup on 22 postings, and of the 52 postings that showed pay on the page and carried markup, 30 left the pay out of the markup. No site blocked the AI crawlers we checked in robots.txt, and 10 of the 45 served an llms.txt file, three of them written by an SEO plugin. WordPress ran 28 of the 45 sites. Only one site mentioned daily or same-day pay, one mentioned E-Verify, and two mentioned a mobile app, which for an industry that recruits from phones is a low number, though the features may exist behind a login.

Several firms did the job well enough to be worth copying. Priority One Staffing Services in Towson showed an hourly range and a posting date on all five postings we read, with the minimum and maximum pay in markup served with the page. Maxim Healthcare Services gave explicit ranges, dates and job numbers on all five of its Maryland postings. Prologistix gave every posting a structured base pay field and a job number, with the salary in the markup, and Randstad’s Baltimore branch page showed a range that matched its markup and carried a closing date. SI Staffing showed the wage on every listing on its board, and Profiles, headquartered in Baltimore, showed pay, a job number and a date on each Baltimore posting with markup in the page itself. A directory-based frame is not a complete census, our fetches came from outside the United States, and features hidden behind a login are not counted; these are observations of what a job seeker or a crawler could see on one day, not findings of compliance.

What 80 staffing firms across the country show on their job pages

To see whether Baltimore is unusual, we drew a reproducible sample of 80 independent staffing firms from 16 metro areas, half in states with laws that require pay in job postings (Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Newark, Seattle, Boston, Denver and Minneapolis) and half in states without them (Dallas, Miami, Columbus, Atlanta, Charlotte, Phoenix, Nashville and St. Louis). The frame was Instawork’s public city guides to local staffing agencies, 310 listings in all; we left out the national giants, their brands and franchise networks, shuffled each city’s list with a fixed seed and took five firms from each. On October 14, 2026, we read each firm’s homepage, robots.txt and llms.txt and then sampled up to three open postings in the firm’s home state, opening each once in a browser and once the way a crawler that does not run JavaScript would see it.

The first finding is how hard it is to find a job page at all. Of the 80 firms, 74 had a website we could reach, but only 29 had job postings we could open as pages of their own. Seventeen showed no job listings at all, only an application or a contact form; sixteen listed jobs inside a widget, a frame, a search form or a sign-in wall, with no page per job that a search engine could index; the rest failed to load, defeated our sampler or showed only out-of-state jobs on the first page. For a business whose product is its open jobs, that is a lot of shop windows with the blinds down.

Where there were postings, most showed pay, and the state law made less difference than we expected. Of the 68 postings we sampled from 29 firms, 52 showed a rate or a range: 27 of 36 in the pay-transparency states and 25 of 32 elsewhere. The law showed up in the form of the number rather than in its presence, with ranges more common where the law requires them and single figures more common where it does not. What separated the sites more sharply was the software behind the job board. Job-posting markup, the structured data Google reads, appeared on 45 of the 68 postings, including every one of the 19 postings from boards built by Haley Marketing, a web agency that serves staffing firms, against 26 of the other 49. Only 30 postings put the salary into the markup, and 22 that showed pay on the page left it out of the markup or had no markup at all. In the pay-transparency states, 10 postings displayed their pay only after JavaScript ran, which means a crawler that does not run it never sees the number the law required the firm to publish. Every marked-up page that named an employer named the staffing firm, and none used the “confidential” option Google offers. In the transparency states, 9 of the 19 marked-up postings had been posted more than 90 days earlier, against none elsewhere, and 3 carried a closing date that had already passed, which tells Google to drop them but leaves them in front of anyone who lands on the page.

None of the 73 robots.txt files we could read blocked the AI crawlers we checked, and 23 of the 74 sites served an llms.txt file, 15 of them generated automatically by an SEO plugin or a site builder. Six sites refused a request that identified itself as an AI crawler while serving the same page to a browser, which suggests a firewall setting the owner may not know about. WordPress ran 51 of the 74 sites. The firms doing it well made it look easy. CornerStone Staffing in Dallas showed the hourly rate on every sampled posting, with markup that carried the salary, posting and closing dates, employment type and the firm’s name. Wood Personnel Services in Nashville and KP Staffing in Dallas did the same, KP with salary ranges on both postings and an llms.txt; Talent Groups in Boston showed a range of $44 to $54 an hour with matching markup; and 5280 Staffing Solutions in Denver did all of it on a Wix site. The sample is small, at most three postings from each of 29 firms, and the difference between the two groups of states is not statistically meaningful; we report it as a snapshot of one day.

The job board is the store

A staffing firm sells on two shelves. Job seekers shop its open jobs, and clients shop its people, its rates and its speed. Most staffing websites treat both as brochures: a careers page that frames a job board from the applicant tracking system, and a “request staff” form that sends an email. Run as a store instead, each shelf becomes something search engines, AI assistants and the firm’s own reporting can read.

A job page is a product page

Google reads job ads as structured data, and its JobPosting documentation, last updated on September 8, 2026, is in effect a product listing policy for jobs. A page must describe a real opening with a way to apply; jobs that “require a login to view the job description” are not allowed; expired jobs must be removed or marked with a closing date in the past; and, as noted above, résumé collection is allowed “for open positions only.” Two properties matter particularly to staffing firms. The salary field, baseSalary, is described as “the actual base salary for the job, as provided by the employer (not an estimate),” with the note that only employers can provide it; a temp firm that employs its temps is that employer, and a recruiter can pass through the client’s range, which in Maryland the law already requires it to publish. And the hiring organization may be marked confidential when “a staffing agency” is hiring “on behalf of an anonymous employer,” which is how most staffing ads are written anyway.

Maryland’s pay-range law and Google’s markup ask for the same numbers. A range of $18 to $21 an hour in the text of the ad becomes a MonetaryAmount with a minValue of 18, a maxValue of 21 and a unitText of HOUR, the worksite becomes jobLocation, the day the ad is published becomes datePosted and the day the order is expected to close becomes validThrough. When the ad is generated from the order, as described below, the markup is a by-product; when it is typed into a job board form, it is usually missing. In our Baltimore census, 56 of 87 Maryland postings carried job-posting markup, but only 22 put the salary in it, and 30 postings that showed pay on the page left it out of the markup; nationally, 30 of 68 sampled postings carried the salary in their markup.

Close the ad in search as well as on the site

Job ads are the one kind of page Google lets a site push into its index on demand. Its Indexing API “can only be used to crawl pages with either JobPosting or BroadcastEvent embedded in a VideoObject,” and Google recommends it over sitemaps for job posting URLs because it prompts Googlebot to crawl the page sooner. The default quota is 200 publish requests a day per project, counting both updates and deletions, which is enough for most local firms. The deletion half is the one staffing firms forget: an order filled on Tuesday should leave Google’s index on Tuesday, not when the crawler next happens by, because a job seeker who applies to a filled job is a lead the firm has just disappointed, and Google treats stale postings as a policy problem.

The boards in between

The big job boards treat staffing firms as advertisers rather than as employers. Indeed’s help center says that “staffing, recruitment, and placement companies may post jobs if they sponsor their listings” and that “Indeed gives priority to jobs posted directly by employers,” and many of its sponsored jobs are now billed when a job seeker starts an application rather than per click. Its quality standards ask every post to “include the company name, pay, work hours, benefits, and duties,” warn that weak posts “may be hidden, removed, or require sponsorship,” and offer “Warehouse Associate - $20/hr Night Shift!!!” as an example of what not to put in a title, while posting one job in several cities where it does not exist, which Indeed calls location blasting, can also force sponsorship. LinkedIn requires “search and staffing companies” to use promoted job posts or job slots, and may require promotion for jobs from companies with generic names such as “Confidential Company,” which is how Google suggests a staffing firm name an anonymous client. Pay helps on every board: Indeed reported that 59% of U.S. postings showed pay in May 2025 and that postings with employer-provided pay received 3.8 times as many applications. For a staffing firm, the boards are a paid channel, and its own website, read by Google, is the free one.

The client’s shelf

On the client’s side, the shift marketplaces show what a staffing store looks like. Instawork quotes an all-inclusive hourly rate before a business books a shift and lets it cancel free with 24 hours’ notice; Wonolo’s customer agreement prices a shift as the worker’s pay plus a markup of 45% for independent-contractor work or 55% for W-2 work, unless a separate contract says otherwise; and PeopleReady, a traditional agency, offers business customers “personalized bill rates, instantly” in its app. A Baltimore firm does not need to become a marketplace to borrow the idea. A portal with each client’s own rate card, an order form that captures the worksite, the contract the work falls under and who will supervise it, time approval and invoices is the fastest way to take an order, and it is also where the facts this article keeps returning to get recorded at the source, by the person who knows them.

AI assistants and the job search

Google’s own advice on generative AI search, in a guide last updated on July 10, 2026, is that a site needs no special files or markup to appear in it: Google Search does not use llms.txt files, maintaining one will “neither harm nor help” a site in Google, and structured data, while not required for its AI features, is still worth keeping for rich results. Job seekers increasingly start in an assistant, and so far the assistants mostly send them through the boards. Indeed launched an app inside ChatGPT on February 10, 2026, which still sends applicants to Indeed to apply, and OpenAI announced in September 2025 that it was building a jobs platform with “a track dedicated to helping local businesses compete”; we could find no announcement that it has launched. Google has published nothing specific about jobs in AI Mode, and in 2025 it retired the separate “estimated salary” markup while keeping job postings. What a staffing firm controls is the same in every channel: crawlable job pages with the facts in plain text and in markup, honest titles, ranges per location, and closed jobs taken down. No robots.txt file on the 45 Baltimore staffing sites we read, and none of the 73 in our national sample, blocked the AI crawlers we checked; the larger barrier to being found is a job board that does not give each job a page, or that shows the facts only after JavaScript runs.

A note for readers in Lithuania

Part of our team works from Lithuania, where the questions in this article are answered in one code rather than in a state statute, a city ordinance and a federal rulebook. Temporary agency work is governed by the Labour Code, articles 72 to 80, and it is licensed in effect by a list. Only a temporary employment agency that meets the code’s criteria and appears on the list kept and published by the State Labour Inspectorate may employ temps: it must not be in bankruptcy or liquidation, must have no tax, social insurance or wage arrears, must report its headcount to the Inspectorate every month, and since 2022 must actually have had temporary workers for at least three consecutive months, so that dormant shells drop off the list; a firm that is struck off waits six months to apply again. A fixed-term temp contract, renewals included, may run for at most three years, and unpaid gaps between assignments of up to five working days are allowed once a month, with any other days between assignments paid at a rate of at least the minimum monthly wage. Maryland’s Employment Agency Act leaves temp firms out altogether, and Baltimore City licenses them for $250 a year; Lithuania checks them every month.

The worker’s side is closer to Europe’s than to Maryland’s. A temp must be paid no less than the client would pay if it had hired the worker directly for the same job, and the client is liable if the agency does not pay. The client may not use temps to do the work of strikers or to replace staff it has dismissed, and, under article 79, any agreement that forbids or restricts a temp from taking a job with the client is void, while the agency and the client remain free to agree on a fee for the agency’s services in assigning, recruiting and training the worker. The agency may not charge the temp anything, including for being hired by the client afterward. That is the EU Temporary Agency Work Directive in Lithuanian form, and it means the American conversion fee exists in Lithuania only as a bill between two businesses. Temp work is also much smaller there: Eurostat put temporary agency workers at 0.8% of Lithuania’s employees aged 15 to 64 in 2025, against 2.1% across the EU, and in the Employment Service’s survey of employers on how they dealt with staff shortages in 2025, 18.3% of firms with 250 or more employees had used a temp agency, against 2.0% of those with fewer than ten.

On pay in job ads, Lithuania was there first. Article 25 of the Labour Code requires the employer to state the offered base pay, as an amount or a range, in every job advertisement, including ads published by a media outlet or a job portal, a rule we could trace back to the code’s 2022 rewrite. The portals show it: on October 14, 2026, all 137 listings on the first page of CVbankas.lt showed a salary, 110 of them as a range, and all 150 vacancies on a CV-Online search page carried at least a minimum. Lithuanian ads also say which salary they mean, and on CVbankas 65 listings quoted pay before tax and 72 take-home pay, a distinction a Maryland range never has to make. As of June 7, 2026, Lithuania has also transposed the EU’s Pay Transparency Directive, through Law No. XV-969 of May 21, 2026: employers may no longer ask candidates what they earned before, must give the pay information before the contract is signed, and must adopt or review their pay systems by the end of 2026. Maryland had the same two rules, a range in the ad and no pay-history questions, in place by October 2024, and got there by a different road.

Hiring software is where Europe will ask more. The EU’s AI Act lists systems used “to place targeted job advertisements, to analyse and filter job applications, and to evaluate candidates” as high-risk, and an amending regulation adopted on July 8, 2026, moved those obligations to December 2, 2027; from then, an employer that deploys such a system at work must first inform workers’ representatives and the workers affected. A Vilnius agency that ranks applicants with an AI model will need human oversight and logs by that date. A Baltimore firm using the same tool faces no Maryland rule aimed at AI beyond the 2020 consent rule for facial recognition in interviews.

The closest Lithuanian cousin of a small Baltimore staffing firm may be the tutoring agency. It recruits independent tutors, matches them with families, bills the family and pays the tutor a share, which is the same three-sided record this article keeps describing. On edtalk.lt, a Lithuanian tutoring platform, the tool it sells to tutoring businesses and language schools bundles exactly the parts we would build for a staffing firm, schedules, automatic invoices, tutor pay runs and a client portal, for a commission on lessons that actually take place rather than a monthly subscription. Its recruiting page for tutors leads with the pay, the way Maryland and Lithuania now require of job ads: tutors set their own rate and keep up to 80% of each lesson, and a calculator shows what a given number of hours a week at a given rate earns in a month. Families see the other side of the same transparency, with each tutor’s hourly rate shown on the profile before a lesson is booked, from €15 to €40 an hour. For a Lithuanian reader, the lesson of this article is that the worker, the client, the rate, the ad and the hours are the same data on both sides of the Atlantic; only the clocks and the thresholds differ.

What custom actually costs, and when it pays

We price every project at a fixed fee, agreed before we start, and publish the starting points on our pricing page. For a Baltimore staffing, temp or recruiting firm, the packages map onto this article like this.

Most of our projects land between $6,000 and $30,000, and none requires you to give up an applicant tracking system, a payroll provider or a background-check vendor that already works; the demos page shows finished work. In Maryland, the state’s 3% tax on software and IT services applies to a custom build, so the Online Store package starts at $6,180 with tax.

Whether it pays is arithmetic, and for a small firm the honest answer is often that it does not. A firm with one desk, a recruiting CRM and a payroll provider it trusts is well served at a few hundred dollars a month, and no custom build would be cheaper to own than that. The case changes with volume and with the kind of work. In our model, every ten days taken out of the time between a shift and a paid invoice would save a firm that factors its invoices about $14,658 a year, which pays for the Online Store package at $6,180 with tax in about five months. The compliance side is easier to feel than to price but has real numbers attached: a firm that sends 20 temps to a City service contract for four ten-hour days a week owes each of them two hours of overtime a day, a premium of $68.68 a week per temp at the $17.17 living wage, or $35,713.60 over 26 weeks for the group, which a payroll set up for weekly overtime will not pay, and on top of which the City’s law adds a penalty of $50 a day for each underpaid worker. One avoided finding of that size, or one health care client kept after an audit, pays for the Custom App package about three times over.

What we would build for a Baltimore staffing firm

We would not build an applicant tracking system. Bullhorn, Avionté, TempWorks, Crelate and their peers have spent years on parsing résumés, searching candidates, managing pipelines and running payroll, and a small firm should keep using one of them. What we would build is the layer that sits between that system, the firm’s clients and the state: the records Maryland, Baltimore City and the federal government expect, generated from the firm’s own data instead of typed into it twice.

The first piece is an order and posting record. Every job order carries its worksite, its client, the contract it falls under, the pay range, the benefits description and any other compensation, and every ad is generated from the order rather than written beside it. The ad states the range in the form Maryland’s law expects, uses the firm’s name and, where the Employment Agency Act applies, the word “agency,” and is published to the firm’s own job board with valid structured data, then to the boards the firm pays for. Each publication is logged with its date and channel, an archived copy of the text is kept, and when the order is filled or canceled the ad closes everywhere at once: on the boards, in the page’s structured data and, through Google’s Indexing API, in search. The record answers the question a regulator or a lawyer will eventually ask, three years later: what did this applicant see about pay, and was there a real job behind it?

The second is a worksite rules table. For each assignment it looks up the legal pay floor from the county, the employer size and the contract type; marks City service contract work for daily overtime and the 14-day project payroll report; decides which screening sequence applies, the state’s first-interview rule, the City’s conditional-offer rule or a health care exception, and which background check package may be ordered and when; and attaches the written statement of purpose when a credit report is justified. It then sends clean rate and pay-code instructions to the payroll system the firm already uses, with the sick leave balance that survives a 37-week gap and, from January 2027, the FAMLI contribution split.

The third, for health care firms, is a credential desk: one profile per nurse or aide with license numbers, renewal dates and verification evidence; one requirement profile per client facility that inherits its own rules on immunizations, drug screens and background checks; a gate that will not confirm a first shift until the intersection of the two is complete; the renewal submissions the Office of Health Care Quality expects; orientation acknowledgments per facility; a complaint log; and an export that produces the whole file within the 24 hours the regulation allows.

The fourth is the store, which for a staffing firm faces two ways. Clients get an ordering portal that works like a business-to-business shop: their own rate card, a form to order a shift or a temp with the worksite and contract fields filled in, time approval, invoices that match the hours, and, for City contractors, the project payroll report generated from the same hours. Job seekers get a job board that works like a product catalog: every open job a page with its range, its worksite and an apply button that does not demand an account, every closed job removed. Both halves feed search engines and AI assistants the same facts the firm would show a regulator. The fifth piece is the boring one that makes the rest trustworthy: a two-employer incident and document record, which notes who supervised a worker day to day when an injury happened, keeps each worker’s I-9 under its own retention clock across assignments, and stores the client’s acknowledgments.

None of that replaces the staffing platform, the payroll provider, the background-check vendor or the boards. It connects them through the firm’s own data and makes the firm’s compliance visible to itself. All of it is built on your own database, exportable in full, and yours to own.

Build, buy, or leave it alone

Most staffing firms should buy, and many should keep what they have. A three-recruiter direct-hire search firm needs a good recruiting CRM with a pipeline, email and a client view, and several are sold at a published price per seat; nothing we could build would be cheaper to own. A light-industrial or office temp firm with its own payroll should look first at the platforms built for temp staffing, which handle onboarding, timekeeping, payroll and invoicing as one flow and understand the industry better than any studio would on a first project. A nurse staffing firm should look at the products built around credentialing and shift booking. The people behind these products know staffing, and we would not try to talk a firm out of one that works.

Choose by the meter rather than the logo. A recruiting CRM charges by the seat, a back-office platform often by the worker or the paycheck, a background-check vendor by the report, a job board by the click or the application, a payroll funder by a percentage of every invoice and a client’s vendor management system by a percentage of every hour billed. In our model of a firm with 150 temps on assignment, the software and screening came to between $27,680 and $67,318 a year, factoring every invoice would add $50,569 to $116,529, and a single client’s managed service program fee $57,165. Ask for the price in writing when the pricing page does not show it, as most do not for the tiers and modules a temp firm needs, and treat funding, screening and the boards as part of the same decision, because together they usually cost more than the software.

Then ask every vendor these questions, in writing, before you sign or renew:

• Can every job ad be generated from the job order, with Maryland’s wage range, a general description of benefits and any other compensation, logged by channel and date, archived, and kept for three years after the position is filled?
• When an order closes, does the ad close everywhere, including the page’s structured data and a removal notice through Google’s Indexing API?
• Can the screening workflow differ by worksite, so that a Baltimore City order cannot run a criminal-record check before a recorded conditional offer, while a Baltimore County order follows the state’s first-interview rule?
• Can it pay daily overtime on City living wage work and produce the City’s project payroll report with daily hours within 14 days?
• Does it carry each temp’s sick leave across assignments, reinstate it on a rehire within 37 weeks, count temps toward the 15-employee thresholds, and handle the FAMLI contribution split from January 2027?
• For health care: can it hold a separate requirement profile for each client facility, verify licenses at the first referral and at each renewal, and export a nurse’s complete file within 24 hours?
• Can I export every order, ad, candidate, assignment and pay record, in full, whenever I like, and what does it charge, directly or through a required partner, as a share of my payroll or my billing?

A vendor that answers all of them well has earned the contract. Build when the answers are “through a spreadsheet” for the questions that carry your margin: when City contract work or Montgomery County clients make up a real share of your hours, when a health care client’s audit finding would cost you the account, or when your clients keep asking for a portal you cannot give them. Leave alone what is cheap and works: the applicant tracking system your recruiters like, the payroll provider, the background-check vendor if its turnaround is good, the e-signature tool if it keeps a full audit trail.

Our guide to custom software in Baltimore explains how we work, our article on security guard software covers another business that bills by the hour for people working on a client’s site, our article on home care software covers Maryland’s residential service agency rules, and our article on commercial cleaning software covers the living wage on City and State service contracts in more depth. If you want to find out which of these would pay for you, bring us a quarter of orders, ads, assignments and payroll, and we will show you.

Questions Baltimore staffing firms ask us

Do staffing agencies need a license in Maryland?

It depends on what the firm does. A temp firm that employs its workers and bills clients by the hour, and a recruiter paid entirely by employers that charges candidates nothing and has them sign nothing, are both outside Maryland’s Employment Agency Act. A firm that charges job seekers or makes them sign a contract is an employment agency under that Act and must follow its rules on job orders, advertising, contracts, fees and receipts. Maryland stopped licensing employment agencies in 2003, but Baltimore City still requires a $250 annual employment agency license, and its definition includes temp firms that employ their workers. Firms that refer nurses, nursing assistants or allied health practitioners to hospitals and nursing homes need a health care staff agency license from the Office of Health Care Quality, and firms that refer nurses or aides to clients for home health care need a nursing referral service agency license; the Office’s current applications for both say there is no fee.

Can a staffing agency or recruiter charge me a fee in Maryland?

Most staffing firms charge the employer, not the worker. A firm that does charge job seekers is an employment agency under Maryland law, may not charge a registration fee or collect payment in advance, must state its fee in a written contract and give a receipt for each payment, and is limited in what it may collect if a job ends within 90 days. If a placed worker earns no more than the minimum wage, the agency may take no more than 20% of its fee from any one paycheck.

Do staffing agencies have to include pay in Maryland job postings?

Yes, on our reading. Since October 1, 2024, Maryland has required each public or internal posting for a position performed at least partly in the state to include the wage range and a general description of benefits and other compensation. The law defines a posting to include recruitment done “indirectly through a third party” and an employer to include anyone acting in another employer’s interest, which covers staffing firms and recruiters. Records of compliance must be kept for three years, and repeat violations can cost up to $300 and then $600 per applicant affected.

When can a staffing agency ask about criminal records in Baltimore?

It depends on where the job is. Maryland’s statewide law lets an employer with 15 or more full-time employees ask at the first in-person interview, not before. Baltimore City’s ordinance covers employers with 10 or more full-time equivalent employees in the City, including work through temporary and employment agencies, and forbids both the question and the background check until after a conditional offer. Facilities that care for minors or vulnerable adults, and checks that another law requires, are exempt from the City rule.

Can a staffing agency run a credit check in Maryland?

Only in limited cases. Maryland’s Job Applicant Fairness Act bars employers from using credit reports to decide whether to hire, fire or set pay, unless the applicant already has an offer and the report is used for another purpose, or the employer has a substantially job-related reason disclosed in writing, for example a managerial role, access to personal or confidential information, fiduciary duties, or a company card. Banks and some financial firms are exempt.

What is the minimum wage for temps in Baltimore in 2026?

Maryland’s minimum wage is $15.00 an hour, which applies in Baltimore City and Baltimore County. Howard County’s is $16.00, and Montgomery County’s is $18.00 for employers with 51 or more employees, a group that, on our reading, includes most staffing firms because their temps count. Work on a Baltimore City service contract must pay at least $17.17 with overtime after 8 hours in a day, and work on a State service contract in the Baltimore region at least $17.54 since September 29, 2026. Federal service contracts in the area pay by occupation under a wage determination, plus $5.92 an hour in health and welfare benefits.

Do temp workers get paid sick leave in Maryland?

Often, but not always. Maryland’s Healthy Working Families Act counts temps toward an employer’s 15-employee threshold for paid leave, but its definition of an employee leaves out temps of a temporary services agency that does not have day-to-day control over their work assignments and supervision, and people directly employed by an employment agency to provide temporary services; how those two exclusions fit together is unsettled. Where leave is owed, it accrues at one hour for every 30 hours worked, employers may cap it at 40 hours earned a year, and a worker rehired within 37 weeks gets back the unused balance. The law’s exception for as-needed health care workers who can refuse shifts does not apply to people employed by a temporary staffing agency.

When does Maryland’s FAMLI payroll contribution start?

Contributions to Maryland’s Family and Medical Leave Insurance program start on January 1, 2027, at a total rate of 0.9% of wages, of which employers may withhold up to half from employees’ pay. Employers with fewer than 15 employees, counted inside and outside Maryland, pay only the employee share. The first quarterly payment is due April 30, 2027, and benefits begin January 1, 2028. A staffing firm counts its temps, so few firms will qualify as small.

Can a staffing agency offer daily pay in Maryland?

Yes. Since October 1, 2025, Maryland has treated earned wage access offered by a third-party provider as a regulated loan: the provider must be licensed or exempt, fees are capped at $5.00 for an advance of $75 or less and $7.50 for more, a free option must be offered, and the provider may not share its fees with the employer. An employer that pays part of its own employees’ earned wages early, through its own payroll, is not a provider under that law.

Who records a temp worker’s injury on the OSHA log?

The company that supervises the temp day to day, which in most staffing arrangements is the client. OSHA’s rule requires an employer to record injuries to workers who are not on its payroll if it supervises them on a day-to-day basis, and asks the staffing firm and the client to coordinate so that each case is recorded only once. A contract cannot discharge either company’s own obligations; OSHA says it may cite either or both.

What license does a nurse staffing agency need in Maryland?

A firm that refers nurses, nursing assistants or allied health practitioners to hospitals and nursing homes for temporary work needs a health care staff agency license from the Office of Health Care Quality before the first referral. A firm that refers nurses or aides to clients for home health care needs a nursing referral service agency license. The Office’s current applications for both say there is no fee. On October 2, 2026, its directories listed 2,145 health care staff agencies and 391 nursing referral service agencies.

How much does staffing agency software cost?

Of the 20 front-office staffing products we checked on October 14, 2026, 13 published at least one price, ranging from $15 to $215 per user per month; Bullhorn’s small-agency plans were $99 and $165. The back-office platforms built for temp staffing and most payroll providers did not publish prices. For a modeled Baltimore firm with 150 temps on assignment and 8 office users, software and screening at published prices came to $27,680 to $67,318 a year.

What is a VMS or MSP fee in staffing?

When a client buys contingent labor through a vendor management system run by a managed service provider, the staffing firm usually pays a fee out of each invoice. Published public-sector examples include 2.6% in Rhode Island and 1.0% plus a 0.5% state fee in South Carolina; on a $100 bill rate, a 2.6% fee leaves the staffing firm $97.40.

What is a typical staffing agency markup?

There is no single figure. In the 2022 Economic Census, Baltimore-area temporary help firms took in about $1.45 in revenue for every dollar of payroll, office staff included, and one national shift marketplace publishes markups of 45% for independent-contractor work and 55% for W-2 work on top of the worker’s pay. A markup has to cover payroll taxes, workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance, sick leave, screening and the firm’s own costs before any of it is profit.

Can a staffing agency’s jobs appear in Google’s job search?

Yes. Google still supports job posting structured data in the United States in 2026. Each open job needs its own page with the markup, including the pay as baseSalary; a staffing firm hiring for an anonymous client may name the hiring organization “confidential”; expired jobs must be removed or marked with a closing date in the past; and Google’s Indexing API, which accepts only job posting and livestream pages, can tell Google when a job opens or closes.

Should a small staffing firm build custom software or buy it?

Buy the core: a recruiting CRM or applicant tracking system, a payroll provider and a background-check vendor. Consider building the layer that connects them to Maryland’s and Baltimore City’s rules, meaning the posting record, the worksite pay and screening rules, health care credential checks and a client ordering portal, when those rules touch a real share of your hours or your largest clients and your current system handles them in spreadsheets.