Pay transparency: the EU forces Europe's hand
France must transpose an EU pay transparency directive by June 7 — but hasn't scheduled a vote. HR departments are bracing for a major overhaul.
At a Glance:
A 2023 European Union directive requires companies to disclose average pay by gender and job category, post salary ranges in job listings, and stop asking candidates about their previous salaries
HR departments are bracing for a significant overhaul: reclassifying job grades, formalizing evaluation criteria, and abandoning widespread practices that the directive now prohibits
France has not yet scheduled a vote on the implementing legislation — making the June 7, 2026 deadline extremely difficult to meet
What the directive actually requires
The gender pay gap in France’s private sector stood at 21.8% in 2024, according to INSEE, the French national statistics agency. Even in strictly comparable roles within the same company, women earned on average 3.8% less than their male counterparts. The European Union adopted the directive in 2023 specifically to address this persistent disparity, with a national transposition deadline of June 7, 2026.
Despite what the term might suggest, the directive does not give employees the right to see every colleague’s paycheck. It entitles any worker — male or female, public or private sector — to request the average compensation, broken down by gender, for employees performing work of “equal value” within the same organization. It also requires employers to publish salary ranges in job postings, ending the vague “salary commensurate with experience” formulations that have long been standard. And it prohibits HR managers from asking candidates about their current or previous salaries — a practice designed to prevent past inequalities from carrying forward into new jobs. Companies with more than 250 employees will be required to submit annual reports on gender pay gaps to national authorities.
The scale of the challenge is considerable: 66% of French companies currently provide no internal access to pay scales, according to the Association pour l’emploi des cadres (Apec), France’s professional association for managerial and executive employment. And 60% still “systematically or frequently” ask candidates about prior compensation — a practice the directive now bans.
An HR overhaul that was underestimated
Anxiety among human resources departments is tangible. “Saying this will reveal nothing would be a lie,” acknowledged Marion Picart, head of HR at PeopleSpheres, a French HR software company. [translated from French] Some organizations have already set aside budget to cover the pay corrections that compliance audits are expected to surface. Others have gotten ahead of the curve: PeopleSpheres stopped asking candidates about prior salaries as of January 1, 2026.
But beyond budget adjustments, the real challenge lies in reclassifying and formalizing job evaluation frameworks. To justify pay differences — or prove their absence — companies must document objective, verifiable criteria for every position, grade level, and promotion. “Sometimes it’s going to mean launching a significant overhaul,” Picart said. [translated from French] The operational burden is also a concern. Audrey Richard, chief HR officer at Canal+ Group and president of the ANDRH, France’s national association of HR professionals, cautioned that her department could not realistically take on new staff just to field employee inquiries. [translated from French]
Shifting the burden of proof
Beyond the logistics lies a deeper legal shift. The directive introduces what legal experts describe as a reversal of the burden of proof: when a pay gap is identified, the directive could require the employer to demonstrate the absence of discrimination — rather than the employee having to prove its existence. How exactly this principle will be implemented is something the French transposition legislation will need to specify.
“It will no longer be possible to set salaries on a whim,” said Elise Penalva-Icher, a sociology professor at the University of Paris-Dauphine and author of La Frustration salariale. À quoi servent les primes? (”Salary Frustration: What Are Bonuses Actually For?”). [translated from French] “When a woman believes she’s been discriminated against, she can demand accountability.” [translated from French]
The directive sets a mandatory intervention threshold for companies with more than 100 employees: any gender pay gap exceeding 5% must be justified or corrected. But it permits such gaps where they can be attributed to “non-sexist, bias-free” objective criteria — a standard vague enough, Penalva-Icher argues, to leave room for manipulation. It would be possible, she notes, to invoke “commitment to the job” to explain away significant disparities.
“Pay transparency is not a perfect tool.” — Elise Penalva-Icher, University of Paris-Dauphine
This stands in notable contrast to the approach taken in several U.S. states — Colorado, California, and New York among them — where pay transparency laws have been on the books for several years and have already generated both legal disputes and measurable narrowing of pay gaps. The EU directive goes further in one key respect: the mandatory reporting and justification requirements apply across all member states simultaneously, not state by state.
A useful directive — but behind schedule
France is not starting from zero. Since 2019, the index de l’égalité professionnelle — commonly called the index Pénicaud after the labor minister who introduced it — has been mandatory for all companies with at least 50 employees, measuring gender pay gaps across a standardized set of indicators. The EU directive goes further, but builds on infrastructure that already exists.
The immediate problem is elsewhere. The draft transposition text presented to social partners in early March 2026 still leaves significant grey areas unresolved — particularly around the employee thresholds that determine which rules apply, and the corrective measures required for companies with between 50 and 99 employees, both of which are punted to implementing decrees. As of today, the legislation has not been scheduled for a parliamentary vote. The June 7 deadline looks extremely unlikely to hold.
Nearly 62% of managers surveyed by Apec fear that pay transparency will generate tension within their teams. Olivier Gondry, chief HR officer at IKEA France, dismisses that concern for his own company — where the Swedish parent group’s model already includes publishing full salary bands — while acknowledging he is “fairly worried about companies that haven’t gotten to grips with this yet.” [translated from French]
The bottom line
Pay transparency is sound policy — provided its tools are equal to its ambitions. The EU directive establishes a serious framework, but its real-world effectiveness will depend on how rigorously companies are required to formalize their evaluation criteria. If those criteria remain malleable or contestable, transparency risks producing data without producing justice. The real question is not whether salaries will become visible — they will. It’s whether the rules governing them will be robust enough to make that visibility matter.
Sources: France Info · INSEE · Apec