What we learned over breakfast in Dublin about EU pay transparency

As of this week, only three countries have transposed the directive. Slovakia, Italy, and Lithuania. Sweden has said it won’t transpose at all. Most others are somewhere between early drafts and silence. Ireland’s pre-employment provisions (salary ranges in ads, salary history ban) are moving through the Oireachtas via the Equality Bill, but the broader Pay Transparency Bill hasn’t been given priority status.

The government has confirmed you won’t be penalised while the legislation is being finalised. And there’s precedent for a gap between transposition and commencement. Ireland signed the gender pay gap act into law in 2018 but didn’t require reporting until 2021. So there will be runway. But the directive itself is already published, and the groundwork can start now.

In Ireland there’s no existing framework for this. No works councils, no pre-set categorisation structures. Whatever you build may eventually be tested in court, and you need to design it with that in mind. Emma pointed to UK retail cases where shop assistants were found to be doing work of equal value to warehouse workers despite completely different day-to-day tasks, assessed on effort, working conditions, and economic contribution. That kind of reasoning is coming here too.

Ger’s practical suggestion was to involve your employees in the categorisation process, even informally. There’s no legal requirement, but being able to point to a consultative process where employees had input adds a layer of defensibility that’s hard to argue with.

Before you can do any categorisation or reporting, you need the total remuneration position for every employee. Salary, bonuses, commission, stock options, benefits. Ger flagged that for most organisations this information is scattered across payroll systems, spreadsheets, and different vendors. Getting it into one place is a serious piece of work in itself. Your finance and payroll teams need to be involved from the start, not brought in at the end.

One audience member had a sales team where everyone is on the same base salary with the potential to earn up to 20% in commission, but actual earnings vary by individual performance. Is that a pay gap? The panel’s answer was no. If everyone has the same earning potential and the same structure, the variance is about performance outcomes, not pay criteria. That distinction between what you’ve offered and what someone has earned is going to be important.

Another question came up about optional benefits like company cars, health insurance, and pension matching, where the benefit is offered to everyone but not everyone takes it up. Emma confirmed that this is objectively justifiable. If two people are on the same salary and one opts into the company pension while the other goes with auto-enrolment, the gap in total remuneration can be explained by personal choice. The key is that the benefit was offered equally. The same logic applies to flex benefits where employees can trade between pension contributions, annual leave, and other options.

Someone who’d recently been through a TUPE transfer asked whether employees who came across on different salaries would trigger a gap. Emma confirmed that a TUPE transfer is an objective justification. You can’t adjust their salary when they transfer in, and that’s a defensible reason for the difference. The question of how long that justification holds is less clear, but the transfer itself is solid ground.

This was one of the sharpest moments in the discussion. An audience member described a category of just two people, one male and one female, where the male employee is paid substantially less. If he requests pay information, the company has effectively disclosed his colleague’s salary. Germany has addressed this by requiring a minimum category size of six. Ireland has published no guidance.

The directive’s workaround is clunky. Route the data to a worker representative or labour inspector instead and let them advise the employee. For startups and SMEs with small teams, this is a fundamental compliance gap that could delay responses or force awkward workarounds. It’s one of the clearest unresolved issues in the whole directive.

A quick but important clarification from the Q&A. You report within each entity and each country. You won’t be comparing your Irish marketing manager’s salary to their counterpart in Spain. Categories and pay gaps are assessed within each national workforce.

A lot of employers are looking at the 150-employee reporting threshold and thinking this doesn’t apply to them yet. But as Emma pointed out, Ireland already triggers gender pay gap reporting at 50 employees. It would be prudent to assume the pay transparency threshold will be aligned to match. If you’ve got 50 or more employees in Ireland, plan as though you’ll need to report.