Job Evaluation Under the EU Pay Transparency Directive: Pathways to Defensible Categories

BLOG OVERVIEW: Defensible worker categories under the EU Pay Transparency Directive start with a sound, gender-neutral job evaluation. Five triage questions show where an employer’s foundation breaks down: whether jobs were evaluated, whether documentation survives, whether the evaluation reflects the Directive’s criteria of skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions, whether pay structures preserve equal-value groupings, and whether categories follow that structure. The first unresolved answer sets the starting point. Member State rules in Spain, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Poland, a multinational footprint, employer size, and pay transition planning can all change the pathway.

In previous blogs (see Part I and Part II), we underscored the importance of having defensible worker categories under the European Union’s Pay Transparency Directive (the Directive), and we shared five questions for triaging the basis for employer worker categories. In Part III of this series, we’ll describe pathways employers can take to get to defensible worker categories based on the answers to those triage questions. The steps employers may need to take to comply with the Directive and Member States’ transpositions depend on several factors. Our goal is to help employers understand what a route to defensible worker categories might look like for them—without taking on any unneeded work or leaving themselves exposed to risk.

In this piece, we will do the following:

1. Briefly reprise the five triage questions and outline what work employers should consider undertaking based on their answers.
2. Discuss factors that may change an employer’s compliance strategy.
3. Share some important implementation considerations.

Pathways to Defensible Worker Categories Based on Responses to Triage Questions

An employer’s pathway to defensible worker categories is determined by answers to questions about the employer’s foundation for assigning value to jobs and how that value is reflected in its pay structures and, in turn, its worker categories.

Part II of this series proposed the following five questions for triaging worker categories (some reworded here slightly for ease of understanding):

1. Was a job evaluation or gender-neutral model used to determine the value of jobs in the organization?
2. Can the job evaluation information, criteria, methods, and results used to assign value to jobs be furnished?
3. Is the assessment of job value sound and consistent with the Directive’s requirements?
4. Does the pay structure preserve distinctions in the value of work assigned to jobs?
5. Are worker categories based on the pay structure, or something else?

Although most questions are intended to have a yes or no response, it’s likely that employers may be unsure about some questions or that certain questions do not apply because an employer doesn’t have a job evaluation or hasn’t yet created worker categories, for example. All such responses are informative and potentially point to different pathways forward.

The sequencing of the five questions is also intentional. For worker categories to be defensible, each question really needs a “yes” answer. The first unresolved question—whether it’s answered with a “no,” “unsure,” or “not applicable”—points to the first foundational piece of work an employer will need to tackle. We’ll step through the five questions and discuss what pathways forward answers to each might involve, keeping in mind that later we will detail situations that may change what an employer should do. A “not applicable” answer may mean different things, though: Without a job evaluation, Questions 2 through 4 cannot yet be answered, whereas an employer that has not created worker categories can build them from its pay structure.

Question 1: Was a job evaluation or gender-neutral model used to determine the value of jobs in the organization?

Employers who have not conducted a job evaluation or who have not used a gender-neutral model to assign value to work will likely need to do one of those. This work serves as the basis for employer pay structures and worker categories under the Directive. Vendor offerings that map jobs to market-based pay structures or that provide market-based pay ranges for jobs are highly unlikely to qualify here. Employers who are unsure of whether they have indeed done this may need to check (e.g., with an internal expert, the vendor used, or a third-party expert).

Some employers may already assign value to jobs through a national or collectively agreed classification framework. Whether that provides a defensible foundation will depend on the framework and applicable Member State requirements, as discussed below. Employers may also find that some jobs have been evaluated and others have not. In that case, work that needs to be done may be limited to only those unevaluated jobs, provided they are assessed with the same method and criteria as the rest so that the results remain comparable. EU guidance also offers job evaluation methods scaled to employer size, which we return to below.

Undertaking a job evaluation can be a considerable amount of work, and it requires that an employer’s job descriptions are comprehensive and up to date. Sometimes, the job evaluation work begins with updating job descriptions, which can also be resource intensive. Thus, it’s critical to answer this question accurately. And when the answer is “no,” the first step on the pathway to defensible worker categories for employers is to conduct a job evaluation or use a gender-neutral model to determine the value of jobs in the organization.

Question 2: Can the job evaluation information, criteria, methods, and results used to assign value to jobs be furnished?

It’s one thing to have completed a job evaluation or have had value assigned to jobs with a gender-neutral model; it’s another to have documentation available that shows what was done and how. Sometimes no information is available, sometimes pieces of information are available, and other times most or all information is available. What’s important here is that the criteria, factors, and subfactors used to evaluate jobs (or establish a model’s job framework) can be produced, that information on who participated in the process is available, and that the scores or results can be accessed. Considering the Directive and EU guidance, the gender of participants in the process and whether they received training on gender bias is also useful.

If some information appears to be unavailable, it’s worth searching for it or contacting a vendor who previously supported the work to see if it can be supplied. As mentioned in Part II of this series, this information can live in different places within the employer’s organization, as well. Without documentation, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to defend even the best job evaluation or gender-neutral model. Because much of this work may have pre-dated the Directive, documentation is critical to answering Question 3: whether the assessment of job value is sound and consistent with the Directive’s requirements.

Not all missing information may be viewed as equally consequential. Arguably among the most critical information from a job evaluation or gender-neutral model are the criteria, factors, and subfactors used to evaluate, score, or rank jobs. It would be a very difficult task to determine whether the Directive’s criteria (skills, effort, responsibility, and working conditions) were all used in assigning value to jobs without having this information available just based on where jobs might happen to sit within an employer’s pay structure.

Having the results of the job evaluation or assignment of jobs to a gender-neutral model is likewise integral. Without them, it’s difficult to show that the present position of jobs within an employer’s pay structure is based on the job evaluation work that was done. This is necessary for answering Question 4. Over time, jobs may have moved within a pay structure for reasons unrelated to their assessed value. The weights assigned to evaluation factors or criteria are important, too, particularly if an employer needs to revisit or adjust the original evaluation.

The importance of missing documentation depends on what information is unavailable and whether it can be recovered. Some records are needed to determine whether the original evaluation meets the Directive’s requirements, while others are important for showing how the results were used or whether they remain accurate.

Missing information does not necessarily mean an employer needs to start over. A more targeted search within the organization or a request to the vendor who performed the evaluation may turn up what is needed. If the criteria and weights used to evaluate jobs are available, but the individual job ratings or scores are not, it may be possible to re-rate a sample of jobs against the original approach to see whether their current placements hold.

An employer might also limit new ratings to job families or populations for which documentation is missing, rather than repeating the entire exercise. Whatever can be recovered or reconstructed would still need to be assessed under Question 3.

The key takeaway here, though, is that if critical documentation remains missing after these efforts, employers may need to decide whether to conduct a new job evaluation or accept the risk of proceeding without it. Conducting a new job evaluation carries more upfront costs and time, but if done correctly mitigates risk. Proceeding without documentation of how value was assigned to jobs can expose employers to risk. Worse, it could mean that value has not been assigned to jobs in a manner that comports with the Directive, which can create significant problems downstream. Any decision to proceed should be documented and made with legal counsel, rather than resting on an assumption that missing documentation is inconsequential.

Question 3: Is the assessment of job value sound and consistent with the Directive’s requirements?

Having documentation on how value has been assigned to jobs is a prerequisite for determining whether that process does or does not meet the Directive’s criteria. As mentioned in Part II, this determination may require the internal or external expertise of professionals who work in job evaluation. It’s likely, too, that some aspects of an employer’s prior job evaluation do meet the Directive’s requirements, whereas others do not. That determines what an employer would do next to ensure the foundation of its worker categories is defensible.

An expert review of an employer’s job evaluation or a gender-neutral model used to map jobs may indicate that not all of the Directive’s four criteria (skills, effort, responsibility, or working conditions) were used to assign value to jobs—or that soft skills or other commonly overlooked factors more prevalent in female-dominated jobs were not adequately represented among the evaluation criteria. Additional work may be necessary to assess jobs on those additional criteria or factors. The feasibility of this work may depend on what information from the original job evaluation is available or the flexibility, for example, of a vendor’s job framework. Adding a missing criterion would mean rating every job on that criterion and recalculating the results, even if the employer otherwise keeps its existing evaluation method.

If the evaluation criteria do comport with the Directive’s requirements but the weighting of those criteria does not, it may be possible to adjust the weights and re-rank or rescore jobs. Depending on what information is available (e.g., raw ratings for jobs), this could be a straightforward or impossible task.

There is additional guidance provided by the EU in the European Institute for Gender Equality’s step-by-step toolkit that outlines methods for conducting gender-neutral job evaluation. That guidance could include steps that employers or vendors did not take when assigning value to jobs, such as gender-bias training or involving both men and women in the process. While it’s difficult to know exactly how the results of the job evaluation might have been different if those steps had been taken, it may be possible to reassess a representative sample of jobs abiding by that guidance. This is easier to do when the original factor-level ratings and degree definitions are available. A sample should include female- and male-dominated jobs at comparable levels, and differences between the original and new ratings should be treated as a signal for further review, not necessarily proof of bias. If there are material differences, an employer should weigh re-evaluating jobs.

Other shortcomings may have less to do with the evaluation criteria than with the information used to assess jobs. If job descriptions were outdated or written primarily for recruitment, for example, an employer might need to update them and re-evaluate the affected jobs.

Unclear factor or degree definitions may also need to be rewritten. Because those definitions apply across jobs, making such changes can require a broader re-evaluation to ensure that the results remain comparable.

In other cases, the criteria and definitions may be sound, but they were not applied consistently. Comparing jobs from different families or functions could help identify those problems, with new ratings focused on the areas where inconsistencies are found.

The scope of the work therefore depends on the extent of the problem. Some deficiencies can be addressed within particular job families or populations, while others may require reassessing all jobs. Keeping the original evaluation method does not necessarily mean avoiding substantial new work.

Addressing this issue could be as simple as tweaking the weights of factors or criteria used to evaluate the jobs or could be so involved that an employer may conclude that conducting a new job evaluation altogether would be cleaner and simpler than shoring up an existing one. This is certainly a place where professional and legal guidance is recommended—both in evaluating the extent to which the assignment of value to jobs meets the Directive’s requirements and in deciding what steps to take if it does not.

Question 4: Does the pay structure preserve distinctions in the value of work assigned to jobs?

Even if an employer’s job evaluation meets the Directive’s requirements, its pay structure might not reflect the assessed value of jobs if market data has influenced the assignment of pay grades or levels, or if the divisions within the pay structure group jobs of different value together or separate jobs of equal value.

The first issue arises when employers have moved some job families into different grades to accommodate market pricing. One option is to return to the job evaluation results and identify equal-value groupings based on those results. Another is to realign the affected grades or levels to reflect the assessed value of jobs. Either way, worker categories should be based on equal-value groupings, rather than grades that have been adjusted to reflect market pay.

Market-based adjustments may also affect employers who have mapped their jobs to a vendor’s architecture. Assuming the architecture was based on gender-neutral, objective criteria that align with the Directive (with supporting documentation), but job levels were adjusted for some job families or functions to address the market, the employer would be in a similar position. It would need to go back to the vendor to see if it could recover job levels that produce groupings of jobs that have equal value, independent of the market. If that’s not possible, employers may unfortunately find themselves in the position of deciding whether a new job evaluation or mapping to a vendor’s gender-neutral model is necessary to comply with the Directive.

The second issue concerns employers whose pay structures rest on a documented job evaluation process that meets the Directive’s requirements, but the levels of their pay structures are so broad or narrow that they don’t map to equal-value groupings of jobs. The fix for this issue may be more straightforward, provided certain job evaluation information exists (e.g., raw job evaluation scores of jobs). Pay levels that are too broad should be further delineated, and those that are too narrow should be mapped or collapsed to create equal-value groupings. If a pay structure separates jobs of equal value into different job families, functions, business units, etc., then it may be worth considering revising the pay structure to prioritize grouping equal-value jobs together, even if the content of those jobs is quite different.

In all cases, employers may choose to maintain their existing pay structures, pay grades, or job levels but create an equal-value mapping or Directive-specific set of job levels that exist alongside them. But there is greater potential for risk in doing this: If actual worker pay is based on existing pay structures, which do not reflect the assessed value of work, workers in jobs of equal value may be paid quite differently. So those employers may decide that ultimately realigning their pay structures to the assessed value of jobs is the better choice, despite how much work this may involve. We’ll discuss the tension between market-based pay decisions and equal-value groupings in more detail in a subsequent installment. The implementation considerations below also become important if employers choose to realign their structures.

Question 5: Are worker categories based on the pay structure, or something else?

It’s possible for an employer to have the best foundation in place for creating worker categories that comport with the Directive—a sound, gender-neutral job evaluation and a pay structure that reflects differences in the value of work—and still have worker categories based, in whole or in part, on something other than the assessed value of its jobs. Its pay structure can be used to differentiate the assessed value of jobs, but in the process of constructing worker categories, other information or factors were used (see Part II for a detailed discussion). These employers essentially need to reconstruct their worker categories on the basis of equal-value groupings, which are ideally reflected in the employer’s pay structure.

The pathway to defensible worker categories for employers in this situation may be the easiest. There are no jobs to reassess, no jobs to re-slot, and no pay ranges to adjust. That doesn’t mean there are no consequences, however. New categories may change the pay information workers receive or the gaps employers report, and they may reveal differences that need to be examined or addressed. Categories also need to be formed in cooperation with workers’ representatives where applicable (Article 3(1)(h)).

Factors That Might Change an Employer’s Pathway to Defensible Worker Categories

A few factors can change the approach an employer might otherwise take based on the five triage questions to ensure its worker categories are defensible. These factors can include Member State transpositions of the Directive that impose specific or more restrictive requirements on employers, the use of national or collective classification frameworks, and whether an employer has entities and workers in multiple Member States.

Member State and Other Jurisdictional Regulations and Frameworks

As of October 2026, it does not appear that any Member State requires (or will require) employers to use one particular job evaluation tool. The requirements for job evaluation and classification do differ, however. Spain already requires job evaluation within the pay audit for employers subject to that requirement, and an evaluation completed using its voluntary government tool is deemed to meet the formal requirements of the existing regulation. In Italy, use of an applicable national collective agreement (CCNL), including its classification system, may provide a rebuttable presumption of conformity. Lithuania already requires remuneration systems built on gender-neutral criteria, and proposals in the Netherlands and Poland would require employers to evaluate and classify jobs while leaving the method open. All three apply regardless of employer size. The legal landscape is still changing, however, and employers should stay abreast of updates.

Collective classification systems raise a related question: whether an employer can rely on a job categorization framework it did not build. Member States answer that question differently, and Italy’s presumption sits at one end. The Netherlands’ proposal would let a collectively agreed system satisfy the obligation where it meets the legal requirements. Spain goes further: under its existing rules, the classification used in the company and in the applicable collective agreement must itself be consistent with the requirements for assessing job value. A national or collective framework, then, is a starting point for review rather than a substitute for it.

Employers with a Multinational Footprint

Employers with multiple entities and workers across the EU may face a particular challenge. They may have conducted a multinational job evaluation and have a pay structure with grades in place that are shared across all entities. Or they may be looking to conduct a job evaluation soon to comply with Member State legislation that has been or will soon be enacted. However, because Member States may impose different requirements on how to evaluate jobs or group workers and because not all Member States are on the same timeline in terms of transposition, multinational employers may find themselves in a bind in terms of what to do. Do they use one method to evaluate jobs, create a pay structure, and group workers? Will that method be compliant with all Member States where they have entities? Or do they opt to use different approaches offered by Member States that are deemed compliant or come with a presumption of conformity, which may reduce their risk?

Multinational employers with entities and workers both within and outside the EU who operate under a single pay structure and have determined the value of jobs using one approach face the added potential challenge of having to accommodate myriad EU Member State requirements that may require multiple changes. What works in the United States, for example, may not work well in the EU.

One possibility is to keep a common approach to evaluating jobs but make adjustments for particular Member States. Another is to use localized frameworks and map them to a global structure. Either approach may require agreement on evaluation criteria with workers’ representatives where they exist, potentially in several nations. Employers should also distinguish the scope of required reporting from the comparators available for equal pay claims: the Directive recognizes comparisons based on a single source that determines pay conditions, which may extend beyond an individual employer (Article 19(1)).

Employer Size

Employer size is another consideration, although being a small employer does not obviate the need for defensible worker categories. The right to information under Article 7 of the Directive is not limited to employers above a particular headcount. As noted above, some Member State requirements apply regardless of employer size.

One issue for smaller employers is that providing information about pay within a small worker category could make an individual worker identifiable. Article 12(3) allows Member States to restrict disclosure in those circumstances to workers’ representatives, the labor inspectorate, or the equality body. Whether and how that restriction applies depends on the Member State’s transposition.

Having only a few workers in comparable jobs does not remove an employer’s potential exposure under equal pay law, either. Article 19(3) allows other evidence when no real comparator can be established, including evidence of how someone would be treated in a comparable situation.

A smaller organization with relatively few jobs may have an easier path to conduct a new evaluation if its existing method or documentation is inadequate. The EU toolkit includes methods designed for smaller organizations, including a graduated factor comparison approach for micro-organizations.

The Directive also provides some assistance and flexibility for smaller employers. Article 11 calls for technical assistance and training for employers with fewer than 250 workers, and Article 6(2) permits Member States to exempt employers with fewer than 50 workers from certain pay progression transparency requirements.

Implementation Considerations

Realigning a pay structure is not an overnight change: worker pay moves after the ranges do, and the transition has to close unjustified gaps within a reasonable period.

Changes to an employer’s pay structure can have important implications for worker pay. Moving jobs into different grades changes the pay ranges associated with those jobs without automatically changing what workers are paid. This can leave some workers below the new range minimum or above its maximum. Employers will need to determine whether and how to adjust the pay of affected workers, taking into account the cost of those adjustments and their obligations under the Directive.

For workers whose pay falls below the minimum of a new range, employers can consider an increase to the minimum, sometimes phased over one or more pay cycles. Workers already within the new range may simply find themselves at a different position in the range, with any changes addressed through normal compensation reviews.

Workers whose pay exceeds the maximum of a new range present another challenge. Some employers use pay protection, or “red-circling.” These arrangements may make a transition more manageable, but continuing differences in pay among workers doing work of equal value still need an objective justification. Employers should be cautious about allowing temporary arrangements to become permanent exceptions.

Reducing workers’ pay to align with a new structure is a different matter. Employment contracts, collective agreements, and national law may limit what can be done. Whether a particular pay reduction is permissible should be reviewed with local legal counsel.

Changes also do not necessarily happen overnight. Employers often phase in new grades and pay arrangements, but a transition plan should not be treated as an excuse for leaving unjustified differences in place indefinitely. The Directive expects unjustified differences to be remedied within a reasonable period (Articles 9(10) and 10(4)).

Timing matters for reporting, too. Worker categories may be reconstructed after a reporting period, but the pay decisions and amounts paid during that period cannot be changed after the fact.

Workers’ representatives may also have a role in these decisions. Under Article 4(4), the criteria used to assess the value of work are to be agreed with representatives where they exist, and the Directive calls for the formation of categories in cooperation with representatives where applicable. National consultation or co-determination requirements, as well as collective agreements, may place additional limits on how an employer changes its pay structure.

Finally, employers will need to explain these changes to workers and managers. The value of a technically sound evaluation can be undermined if the resulting decisions are not explained or applied consistently.

Conclusion

The first unresolved triage question an employer encounters generally points to the first piece of work they need to undertake, but it does not necessarily determine how extensive that work will be. Some employers will be able to recover documentation or correct a particular part of their process. Others may need to revisit more fundamental decisions about how they assign value to jobs, structure pay, and group workers. The appropriate pathway depends on what is already in place, what can be defended, and what the applicable Member State requirements demand.

One issue that runs through many of these decisions is the role of the market in setting pay. In the next installment, we’ll take a closer look at how employers can reconcile market-based compensation practices with the requirement to identify and group work of equal value.