The Pay Transparency Directive

Directive (EU) 2023/970 had to be transposed by member states by 7 June 2026. Romania does not yet have an adopted law. That does not mean a plant can wait: the first gender pay gap reports cover the previous calendar year, and for large employers the first reporting date under the directive is 7 June 2027. The data for that report is being generated now, in this year’s payroll.

What the directive requires

The directive applies to all employers, public and private. Some obligations depend on company size, but the basic rules on recruitment and the right to information have no threshold.

In recruitment, candidates have the right to know the initial pay or pay range for the post, set on objective, gender-neutral criteria, before the interview (for example in the job advert). The employer may not ask candidates what they earn or earned with previous employers. Job adverts and job titles must be gender-neutral.

Employees must have easy access to the criteria used to set pay, pay levels and progression. For progression, member states may exempt employers with fewer than 50 workers.

Any employee can ask in writing for their own pay level and for average pay levels, broken down by sex, for the category of workers doing the same work or work of equal value. The employer replies within two months at most and must inform all employees of this right every year. The directive requires states to prohibit contract terms that stop employees from disclosing their pay.

By “pay”, the directive means the basic salary plus any other complementary or variable components, in cash or in kind. Shift allowances, performance bonuses, premiums and benefits all count.

Reporting and joint pay assessment

Reporting of pay gap indicators (the mean and median gap, including on variable components, the proportion of women and men in each pay quartile, and the gap by category of workers) follows this timetable:

• 250 workers or more: by 7 June 2027, then every year;
• 150 to 249 workers: by 7 June 2027, then every three years;
• 100 to 149 workers: by 7 June 2031, then every three years.

Each report covers the previous calendar year. Below 100 workers reporting is voluntary, although a state can impose obligations through national law.

If a report shows a gap of at least 5% in average pay between women and men in a category of workers, which the employer cannot justify with objective, gender-neutral criteria and does not correct within six months of reporting, a joint pay assessment follows, carried out together with employee representatives.

In disputes, the burden of proof shifts to the employer. If an employee presents facts from which pay discrimination can be presumed, the employer must prove there was none. An employer that has not met its transparency obligations starts at a disadvantage, except for clearly unintentional and minor infringements.

Where Romania stands

On the Senate website, legislative proposal L445/2026 on pay transparency, initiated by a group of senators and deputies, was registered on 17 June 2026 under the urgent procedure. The Legislative Council gave a negative opinion. The labour and legal committees filed favourable reports with amendments, but on 14 October 2026 the Senate plenary rejected the proposal (27 votes in favour, 1 against, 62 abstentions). The Senate was the first chamber notified, and the proposal was sent on to the Chamber of Deputies.

What remains unclear: when the Chamber of Deputies will vote, in what form, from what date the obligations will apply, who will receive the reports, how workers will be counted for the thresholds, what penalties there will be and whether Romania will use the exemptions the directive allows. Until the law is published in Monitorul Oficial (the Official Gazette), there are no new obligations in Romanian law, because a directive does not bind private employers directly. The deadlines in the directive are still the benchmark the law will be written against.

What HR can do now

The part that takes longest is the structure that makes the report possible. A report is simple to calculate but hard to explain if pay has grown for years through individual negotiations.

1. Build a job architecture. Group the plant’s jobs into families (operators, maintenance technicians, quality inspectors, engineers, administrative staff) and into levels within each family. The directive requires the value of work to be assessed on criteria that include skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions. An operator on a heavy press and an operator on fine manual assembly may or may not come out at equal value, but you must be able to show why.

2. Set pay ranges for each level. Without them you cannot publish a range in an advert and cannot explain why two people at the same level are paid differently.

3. Write down the criteria for variable components. Night allowance, hard-conditions allowance, productivity premium, attendance bonus: for each one, who gets it, by what rule and who decides. Check whether the rules hit a group indirectly. For example, an attendance bonus lost on any absence hits first the employees who are absent for sick children; if in your plant these are mostly women, you have an indirect discrimination problem.

4. Check the data by sex now. Take the 2026 payroll, calculate the mean and median gap for each category of workers, separately for base pay and for variable components. If you find gaps above 5% in a category, you have time to explain or correct them before they become mandatory.

5. Change recruitment. Remove the question about current salary from forms and interviews and prepare adverts with a pay range. Drop any salary confidentiality clause from new contracts.

6. Prepare for individual requests. Decide who answers, which system the data comes from and how you define the comparison category, so the first request does not block the department for a month.

Involve the union or employee representatives early. The directive gives them access to the methodology and a direct role in the joint assessment, and job evaluation criteria must be agreed with them where they exist.

Follow the L445/2026 file and any registration at the Chamber of Deputies, and check the final text before fixing your internal procedures.

If you want to compare how other plants are preparing, the discussion continues in the HR & People WhatsApp group.