Niall Pelly

In just three months’ time by 7 June 2026, member states are required to have transposed the provisions of the EU Pay Transparency Directive (PTD) into national law.

The obligations imposed by the PTD are extensive and represent one of the most significant regulatory developments for employers in decades. Yet in Ireland, there remains considerable uncertainty as to how these obligations will be implemented and indeed if these will be on time. 

A recent Mercer survey suggests that only six per cent of Irish employers consider themselves prepared for the transposition deadline. Perhaps this is no surprise, however, when so much uncertainty as to how this will be implemented in Ireland remains.

In this article, we explore the current state of play and what might be a sensible route forward to transposition in Ireland.

Employer obligations under the PTD

The PTD requires employers to provide pay range information to job applicants prior to employment, prohibits questions about pay history, and grants workers the right to request and receive written information about their own pay and average pay levels broken down by sex for workers doing the same work as them or work of equal value to theirs.

Employers must also disclose the objective and gender-neutral criteria used to determine pay, pay levels and pay progression (subject to limited exemptions), may not impose pay secrecy clauses, and must inform workers of their pay transparency rights. Failure to comply will, at a minimum, result in a shift in the burden of proof in equal pay and pay discrimination claims.

These obligations are intended to apply from 7 June 2026, with gender pay reporting obligations commencing one year later for employers with 150 or more workers. Where reporting identifies an unjustified gender pay gap of five per cent or more within a category of workers, employers may be required to undertake a joint pay assessment in cooperation with workers’ representatives. This aspect of the PTD raises particular practical concerns in Ireland, where a voluntarist model of industrial relations has traditionally prevailed and formal worker representation structures are relatively uncommon.

For more information about the PTD’s obligations, read our ‘At a Glance’ Guide.

Obligations on member states

The PTD requires member states to “bring into force the laws, regulations and administrative provisions necessary to comply with this Directive by 7 June 2026”. The PTD sets out 40 specific requirements that “member states shall” do to comply with the PTD, which extend beyond simple legislative transposition, including requirements to:

• provide “technical assistance and training” to employers with fewer than 250 workers;
• designate a body for the monitoring and support of the implementation of national measures implementing the PTD, whose tasks must include “analysing the causes of the gender pay gap and devising tools to help assess pay inequalities…”; and
• make easily accessible “analytical tools and methodologies…to support and guide the assessment and the comparison of the value of work” for equal pay purposes.

Beyond designating the Department of Children, Disability and Equality (DCDE) as the Government department tasked with overseeing the PTDs transposition in Ireland, this support framework (including technical assistance, tools and methodologies) is still awaited. However, these provisions are an essential link in the chain to compliance.

How employer obligations are dictated by member state obligations

The PTD requires that the tools and methodologies that member states must make available “shall allow employers…to easily establish and use” the job evaluation and classification systems that form the basis for determining the “categories or workers” (essentially to enable the assessment of “work of equal value”). This assessment is the foundation on which the rights to pay information, the pay reporting obligations, and the joint pay assessment provisions are based. These job evaluation and classification systems are still outstanding despite being the key to unlocking most of the PTD.

The PTD also permits the European Commission to update Union-wide guidelines related to these gender-neutral evaluation and classification systems in consultation with the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE). The Industrial Relations News recently reported that it is expected that these guidelines will be released this month, and member states and employers are eager to see these given the ticking clock to the transposition deadline.

Presumably, the DCDE is waiting for the EIGE Guidelines to inform the tools and methodologies that it is required to make available to Irish employers so that they can establish each category of worker for the purposes of the PTD.

It seems unlikely that there will be enough time between the release of the EIGE Guidelines and the transposition date of 7 June for the DCDE to complete this exercise – let alone for employers to consider the tools and methodologies that ultimately are made available, and to implement them in time.

How likely is it that the transposition deadline will be met?

Unfortunately, previously some employment law Directives in Ireland have been transposed late or are incomplete. For example, in August 2025, Ireland was fined €1.54 million by the CJEU for missing the deadline for transposition of the Work-life Balance Directive, which was arguably more straightforward than the PTD.

On the flip side, in order to transpose Directives in time, there are examples where insufficient scrutiny has been given to the transposition drafting – for example, the failure to provide for an effective mechanism to resolve collective disputes when transposing the European Works Council Directive in 1996, which is yet to be resolved.

In January 2025, the Government published the General Scheme of the Equality (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2024, which only deals with two discrete aspects of the PTD, namely requiring employers to provide details of salary ranges in job advertisements, and prohibiting employers from asking job applicants about their current or past rate of pay.

The Government has indicated that a stand‑alone Pay Transparency Bill is in preparation, but to date, a General Scheme of this bill has not yet been published. With the Equality (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2024 remaining at pre-legislative scrutiny after 13 months, it seems unrealistic to expect that legislation covering the remaining provisions of the PTD will be put in place in time for the transposition deadline.

However, the European Commission’s position is that all member states must fully comply by the transposition deadline.  

As such, the Government finds itself caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, it can only meet the transposition deadline by legislating with undue haste; while on the other, it risks incurring penalties from Europe for failing to fully comply with its obligations in time. From a political perspective, the DCDE is being challenged by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions to fully adhere to the transposition deadline, while employer-representative body IBEC has called for a delay in implementation.

What is the current position?

In January 2026, the Industrial Relations News reported a statement provided to it by the DCDE, in response to a request from IBEC for a one-year postponement, in which the DCDE stated that “it will work with employers, employees and their representatives in the implementation of the Directive, which will be on a phased basis” (emphasis added). The DCDE also stated that employers “will not be penalised for not having all elements of Directive completed in June 2026”. Although no public statement clarifying or confirming this position has since been made by the DCDE directly.

So, what would it mean if Ireland failed to transpose the Directive on time? As a general application of the principle of direct effect in European law, Directives generally cannot be enforced against private parties. As a result, if anyone is going to be penalised for not having all elements of the PTD completed by June 2026, it’s most likely going to be the State and not private employers. This applies equally if implementation is phased, in circumstances where the PTD does not provide for a phased approach.

A sensible route forward

The most sensible approach here would be to postpone the commencement date of any employer obligations under the PTD that rely on the definition of ‘category of workers’ (i.e. assessing work of equal value) – by at least by one year until 7 June 2027. This would, in practice, provide the clarity to employers on how to fulfil their legal obligations to comply with the provisions such as the right to transparency regarding pay setting and pay progression and the right to pay information.

Ideally this approach would be adopted at European Commission level as the delay in formulating the EIGE Guidelines arguably has contributed to this. However, even if that is not the case, DCDE may adopt this approach to avoid the risk of legislating in haste.

This would also allow sufficient time for the DCDE to deliver the support required by the PTD, including applicable tools, methodologies, technical assistance and training. Employers otherwise would be left to fill the gaps, which would be difficult given the complexity of the obligations particularly in respect of how employers should calculate equal value.

Niall Pelly is partner and head of Littler’s Dublin office.