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by Kevin Browne, CEO & Co-Founder of PayAlign
7th June has passed. Ireland did not transpose the EU Pay Transparency Directive (Directive (EU) 2023/970) into national law. The state’s delay does not shrink your risk. It creates further uncertainty that should be promote preparedness.
Here is the honest lay of the land, written for the people who have to operationalise this. It acts as a deep dive into the operational aspects of the directive and how best to prepare for them.
The Irish Delay
The Minister for Children, Disability and Equality confirmed Ireland is taking a phased approach to implementation. The law will arrive in stages rather than as a single Act. The exact timing to the transposition in Ireland is to be determined.
The government has signalled that employers will not be penalised immediately for components missing because of the state’s own delay. Legal obligations await after transposition.
- The European Commission has confirmed there is no “stopping the clock”. The directive’s timeline stands regardless of Irish drafting speed.
- The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) has warned that once Irish legislation is finalised, employees may be entitled to backdated equal pay compensation reaching all the way to 7 June 2026.
- Employees already in active equal pay disputes can cite the directive today to argue how existing Irish law should be interpreted.
What Lands First: Pre-Employment Rules
Irish legislative signals point to recruitment transparency being enacted in the first phase. To address this first phase, implement two changes now:
- Pay disclosure in hiring – You must state the starting salary or a genuinely defined indicative range in the job advertisement or provide it before the interview.
- The salary history ban – You are prohibited from asking candidates about their current pay or salary history. Recruiter scripts, application forms and screening calls all need auditing.
The Reversed Burden of Proof
Traditionally, the employee carried the burden. They had to prove they were underpaid or discriminated against on the grounds of gender. The directive reverses that. If an employee brings a pay equity claim and you have not complied with the transparency and reporting rules, you are presumed to have discriminated unless you can proactively prove your pay structures are fair, objective and gender-neutral.
- If your job architecture is not documented, you cannot mount the defence.
- If you cannot give objective, evidenced reasons for a pay gap between two people, you have no answer to give.
- In a Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) tribunal, an employer who cannot produce that evidence will lose.
Compliance across the directive will provide you with the evidence file you will need on the day you are legally challenged.
Work of Equal Value
The directive requires you to group your workforce into categories of workers. These are groups of people doing the same work or work of equal value.
For example, a Head of Finance and a Head of Marketing can be judged to have equal value despite sitting in different teams and having different job titles. Due to the fact that they do work of equal value, they will sit in the same job category. This is decided not by the title, but how the roles score against the four gender-neutral criteria set out in Article 4(4) of the directive:
- Skills and expertise
- Effort
- Responsibility
- Working conditions
The state is currently tailoring the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) toolkit into an Irish gender-neutral job evaluation toolkit. Waiting for that toolkit before you understand your own role hierarchy is a mistake. The mapping work is yours to do either way, it is the foundation everything else rests on.
Employee Right to Information
Every employee, in a company of any size, has the right to request all the information regarding their pay and how it fits into their job category. For this reason, companies of every size need an organisation hierarchy to answer these right to information requests in a compliant manner.
The requestor must receive information regarding:
- Their own individual pay level.
- The average pay levels for their category of worker, broken down by gender for people doing the same work or work of equal value.
GDPR Complication: To prevent internal friction, this data must be carefully anonymised. If a worker classification is exceptionally small, employers must apply data protection overrides to ensure that individual salaries cannot be reverse-engineered by colleagues, thereby avoiding a direct breach of GDPR rules.
Fulfilling these granular, gender-deconstructed data requests manually a large body of work. To avoid the manual workload and breaching data privacy protections, employers can book a live demo with PayAlign to see how to automate compliant disclosure workflows and protect small-sample data seamlessly.
Reporting: Per Entity, Not Per Group
Reporting applies to each individual legal entity, not the consolidated corporate group.
The EU Directive reporting thresholds:
Employer size Reporting begins
250+ employees Reports annually from 2027
150 – 249 Reports triennially from 2027
employees
100 – 149 Reports triennially from 2031
employees
There is an Irish wrinkle. The EU baseline is 100+ employees but Ireland’s existing Gender Pay Gap Information Act 2021 already reaches employers with 50+. Legal opinion expects Ireland to hold that stricter 50-employee line in the domestic Pay Transparency Bill rather than loosen it. If you sit between 50 and 100 people, plan on being in scope.
One practical confirmation: the Minister has stated that the Gender Pay Gap Portal will be fully operational for the November 2026 reporting cycle.
For organisations that report in a multinational capacity across Europe, get up to speed with each country’s status at this compliance by country overview which tracks transposition status across all 27 EU member states.
The Joint Pay Assessment
The Joint Pay Assessment trigger has three parts:
- Your reporting reveals a gender pay gap of 5% or more in any single category of workers, not just across the organisation as a whole.
- The gap cannot be justified by objective, gender-neutral criteria.
- You do not close or explain it within 6 months.
If all three hold true, you must carry out a mandatory Joint Pay Assessment (JPA). This is a collaborative audit where employers and workers’ representatives co-operate to analyse an organisation’s gender pay structures. The purpose is to identify, address and remediate any unjustified pay differences between male and female employees doing equal work across the organisation.
Ireland leans heavily on a direct engagement model currently. Many private employers have no formal worker representation structure. A JPA assumes there is worker representation already with Irish companies. A large share of Irish companies do not have this in place. Electing worker representatives within the organisation should begin as a priority.
Penalties and Fines
Enforcement in Ireland will run through the WRC. All penalties and fines are down to local transposition. The EU have made clear that penalties and fines need to be “effective, proportionate and dissuasive”.
The redress available to employees is substantial:
- Full recovery of back pay: This includes variable compensation, pension contributions and bonuses.
- Uncapped compensation for non-material damage: This covers things like lost promotional opportunity or emotional distress.
The administrative fines in Ireland relating to a failure to report or remediate could be:
- Corporate Turnover or Payroll: Maximum penalties can reach up to 4% of a company’s global annual turnover.
- Specific Fines by Country: Fines depend on local transpositions.
The Takeaway: Waiting for the Bill Is the Risky Option
The Irish transposition delay is not permission to pause. It is the opposite.
- Liability may backdate to 7 June 2026.
- Employees can already lean on the directive in live disputes.
- The reversed burden of proof means documenting fair, objective pay structures is a defence you build in advance or not at all.
The organisations that treat this as a drafting delay will spend late 2027 assembling evidence under pressure, in dispute conditions, for pay decisions made years earlier. The ones that treat the directive as already in force will have their job architecture mapped, their pay gaps explained or closed, their evidence file ready. If this is something your organisation needs assistance with, please contact PayAlign for automating all of the directive’s articles or get in touch directly to kevin@payalign.com.
Start from the framework, not the headlines. Our complete guide to the EU Pay Transparency Directive sets out the full obligation in order, so you can work the problem while the Bill is still being written.
About the author
Kevin Browne is the founder and CEO of PayAlign. He leads the company’s mission to help organisations make transparent pay decisions at scale. A recognised advocate for modern compensation strategy, Kevin believes that fair, data-driven rewards are essential to business performance and employee trust.
