Most firms have analysed their pay gap. Few have decided anything.
The Pay Transparency Directive's transposition deadline has passed, but the market has not moved as one. Five Member States have fully transposed. Sixteen have partial or draft legislation. Six have published nothing. For anyone operating across borders, the planning assumption has shifted from a single date to twenty-seven moving ones. That fragmentation is the visible problem.
The tougher challenge is this: ending up with a pay gap figure you trust—and can defend legally—depends on decisions made before you run any calculations. In most organisations, those decisions haven’t been taken consciously.
Same people, two answers
Take one group of employees doing work of equal value. Analyse it in two different ways.
- The first defines cohorts by grade and job family, converts base salary and bonus to full-time equivalents, and analyses sales roles separately. Result: 4.6%.
- The second defines cohorts by grade alone, uses actual bonus amounts next to FTE base pay, and pools everyone in one model. Result: 5.9%.
Same people. Same payroll. Neither is wrong. But only one crosses the 5% threshold that, if unjustified and unremedied within six months, triggers a joint pay assessment with worker representatives.
Five decisions drive that outcome: population, model fit, cohort definition, pay components, and the objective parameters used to explain a difference. None are statistical. They belong with HR, reward and legal. Under Article 4(4), the cohort criteria are agreed with worker representatives, so they are not entirely yours either.
Where the effort is going
Article 5 (recruitment) is being built first. It is operational, visible, and needs no pay equity analysis behind it. One consequence is consistently underestimated. A published salary range is read by candidates and by everyone already doing that job. In most organisations, adverts are signed off by talent acquisition and never seen by reward.
Article 7 (right to information) is where most programme effort sits, and where local divergence bites hardest. Malta allows eight days to respond, Poland thirty; most follow the Directive's two months. Italy caps requests at one per employee per year.
Articles 9 and 10 (reporting and joint assessment) are largely deferred, because even transposed markets have not published full calculation detail.
What to prioritise now
- Reassess your foundations. If your job architecture and levelling have not yet been reviewed against the equal-value criteria, start there, before or alongside your first run.
- Fix your pay and cohort definitions, so your figures rest on a basis you can explain.
- Take a position centrally and locally. Decide what is set once for the group and what is adapted per country.
- Operationalise Article 7. Map how a request arrives, who answers it, and who validates the answer, at a volume you can sustain.
- Define your remediation strategy: which cohorts, which employees, and over what period.
- Plan change and communication, so managers and HR can explain the outcome before anyone asks.
Most organisations have conducted a pay equity analysis; far fewer have a funded remediation strategy. What matters: under Article 18 the burden of proof sits with the employer, and once you know about an unjustified gap, inaction becomes a documented choice.
Where does your organisation stand on those decisions? Deloitte's Pay Equity & Transparency team works with employers across Belgium and Europe on exactly these questions. Get in touch to discuss and what your next steps should be. Pay Transparency and Pay Equity
