EU Pay Transparency Directive 2026: what employers must do now

Before hiring: employers must state the starting salary or a pay range in the job posting or disclose it at the latest before the interview. Questions about previous salary are prohibited.

During employment: workers are entitled to information on their own pay and on average pay levels for comparable work, broken down by sex. Contract clauses that forbid disclosing pay are void.

Reporting: staggered by size — companies with ≥ 250 staff annually, 150–249 every three years, 100–149 from 2031 every three years. Where the unexplained gap exceeds 5%, a joint pay assessment with worker representatives becomes mandatory.

Burden of proof: reversed once a presumption of discrimination is established. Sanctions must be effective, proportionate and dissuasive — including fines and exclusion from public procurement.

The table below captures the state at deadline. It is not legal advice, but it is the market context in which I run staffing and site mandates.

Ahead: Spain. RD 902/2020 already anticipates most of the directive's obligations — pay register, pay audit and equality plan are lived practice. Italy is not first on paper, but the voluntary UNI/PdR 125:2022 certification has been broadly adopted in Northern Italy, with a fiscal incentive and a bonus in public tenders.

Middle: Portugal and Austria. Both have well-established reporting instruments (relatório único, Einkommensbericht), but full EU transposition sits in the parliamentary loop at the start of June 2026. Real compliance pressure is nonetheless high because works councils and unions already use the directive as a bargaining anchor.

Behind: Germany. The EntgTranspG 2017 does not meet the directive (info right only from 200 employees, weak sanctions, no reporting). The draft transposition has slipped. That does not mean German employers can ignore the directive: the pay-in-advertising rules will take effect the moment transposition happens — and many German candidates already expect salary ranges today.

Special case Brazil: not EU law, but Law 14,611/2023 has required semi-annual transparency reports for employers with 100+ workers since 2024. For German groups with Brazilian subsidiaries, this is operationally often the more ambitious frame.

First: introduce salary ranges in job ads — even where national transposition is not yet in force. It costs nothing, improves candidate quality and time-to-fill, and removes the audit lever from the future regulator. Anyone still advertising with 'salary by arrangement' loses candidates, not intermediaries.

Second: build a pay structure by job family. Without defined job grades and reference bands, a joint pay assessment under Article 10 of the directive cannot be run. This is manual work, but the foundation for every scaling step.

Third: document your internal information routine. Any employer without a documented process for answering a request on the average pay for comparable work will, in the first real case, produce either a reversal of the burden of proof or a reputational hit.

Fourth: never ask about previous salary. Not in the interview, not in the form. I have made this explicit in my candidate privacy notice — it is the only reliably non-discriminatory practice and it is unambiguously prohibited by the directive.

Fifth: for relocations and nearshoring, always base the setup on the stricter regime. A Spanish limited company already operates under the full RD 902 regime anyway. An Italian S.r.l. in Northern Italy gains a reputational and cost advantage in public tenders through UNI/PdR 125 certification.