Have you been applying for jobs and felt frustrated not knowing what the pay was? Have you gone through several rounds of interviews, completed tests, prepared documents, and invested significant time and energy, only to find out at the end that the salary was far below your expectations? Or realised after years of working in your role that your colleague is receiving a higher salary for the same work? The EU is changing that!

New EU pay transparency rules are now taking effect across the EU. They willincrease pay transparency, strengthen enforcement of the principle ofequal pay between women and men,and improve access tojustice for victims of pay discrimination.

In practice, this means employers will have to

The new rules also improve access to justice for victims of pay discrimination

The right toequal paybetween women and menforequal workor work of equal valuehas been a founding principle of the European Union since the Treaty of Rome in 1957. Currently, thegender pay gap in the EUstands at 11.1%. To help close this gap and advance gender equality, the Commission proposed theDirective on pay transparency, which was adopted in 2023.

Commission welcomes the political agreement on new EU rules for pay transparency