Quick Hits
- To date, only five countries in the EU have fully implemented the rules outlined in the EU’s pay transparency directive.
- The remaining EU countries are working toward implementing the directive, but have not done so yet, although the deadline for implementation has passed.
The deadline for member states to transpose EU Pay Transparency Directive 2023/970 into national law was June 7, 2026. Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Malta, and Slovakia finalized their national laws on or shortly after the deadline. Poland and Estonia have implemented the requirements related to recruiting only at this stage.
The minimum requirements of the EU directive apply to all public and private employers, regardless of size. It requires employers to:
- provide the starting salary or pay range to a candidate in the job advertisement or state it before the job interview or with enough time to allow a meaningful negotiation regarding pay to take place;
- ensure that job advertisements and job titles are gender neutral and that recruitment processes are executed in a nondiscriminatory manner;
- refrain from asking job candidates about their pay history;
- provide employees, on request, with information on their individual pay level and the average pay levels, broken down by sex, for categories of workers doing the same work or work of equal value; and
- conduct a joint pay assessment (involuntary pay audit) if pay reports reveal a gender pay gap of at least 5 percent that cannot be objectively justified, and it has not been remedied by the employer within a six-month period.
Furthermore, employers with at least one hundred workers are required to publish data on the pay gap between female and male workers in categories of workers that are performing the same work or work of equal value.
The gender pay gap in the EU currently stands at 11.1 percent, according to statistics from the European Parliament. The pay transparency directive mentions several factors contributing to the pay gap, including sex discrimination, gender stereotypes, the overrepresentation of women in low-paid service jobs, the heavy concentration of women in certain industries (sometimes called horizontal segregation), and unequal sharing of family caregiving responsibilities.
The UK government is seeking comments on its own pay transparency proposal.
Next Steps
Implementation of the directive is likely to pick up pace across EU member states in the coming months, and past experience shows that implementation announcements can happen quickly and without advance warning.
Employers with employees in Slovakia, Italy, Lithuania, Malta, Greece, Poland, and Estonia must be compliant with existing legislation regarding the EU pay transparency directive that is in force now. Employers with employees across the EU may want to prioritize an examination of their current job architecture, policies, and practices regarding pay rates, pay transparency, and recruitment processes to identify changes that will be needed in the near future to ensure compliance.
Information and updates on the progress of the directive’s implementation across the European Union can be found using Ogletree Deakins’ Member State Implementation Tracker.
Ogletree Deakins’ Pay Equity Practice Group will continue to monitor developments and will post updates on the Cross-Border, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, and Pay Equity blogs as additional information becomes available.
Daniella McGuigan is a partner in Ogletree Deakins’ London office.
This article was co-authored by Leah J. Shepherd, who is a writer in Ogletree Deakins’ Washington, D.C., office.
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