Directive européenne sur la transparence salariale : les enseignements à tirer de la mise en œuvre précoce de cette directive en Italie pour les employeurs internationaux

Directive (EU) 2023/970 has one goal: close the gender pay gap. It does this by making pay structures visible before disputes happen, not after. Member states had until 7 June 2026 to write it into national law.

That date has now passed. But there's no unified starting line across the EU. A handful of countries are already enforcing the law. Most are still drafting it. At least one is openly questioning whether it will adopt the law at all.

For a company with employees in only one EU country, that's a manageable compliance project. For a company running teams across Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and beyond, it's a different problem entirely. "Are we compliant?" no longer has one answer. It depends which country you're asking about.

How we built this analysis

This isn't a survey or a proprietary dataset — we want to be upfront about that. We drew this from three sources. First, the text of Directive (EU) 2023/970 and Italy's transposing Legislative Decree No. 96 of 7 May 2026. Second, the publicly tracked transposition status across the 27 member states as of July 2026. Third, what PeoItaly's team has observed directly while applying the Italian law to client payrolls since it took effect on 7 June 2026. Where we describe a pattern rather than a documented fact, we say so.

What Changed in Italy on 7 June 2026

Italy transposed the Directive through Legislative Decree No. 96 of 7 May 2026, published in the Official Gazette on 1 June 2026. The obligations became binding from day one, with no grace period. In practice:

• Employers must disclose the initial salary or salary range to candidates before the interview stage.
• Employers may no longer ask candidates about their current or past salary.
• Pay secrecy clauses in employment contracts are unenforceable.
• Employees can request average pay levels by gender for comparable job categories — employers must respond within two months.
• An unexplained pay gap of 5% or more within a job category triggers a mandatory joint pay assessment with employee representatives, unless the company corrects it within six months.
• Companies that fully apply a CCNL from the most representative trade unions get a presumption of compliance. Employees can still challenge individual cases of discriminatory treatment.
• If a pay dispute reaches a legal challenge, the burden of proof shifts to the employer.

Where the Rest of the EU Stands

One detail worth noting: as of 8 June 2026, the Directive's "vertical direct effect" already covers public-sector employers in countries that missed the deadline. Private employers aren't off the hook either. Courts must interpret existing domestic law in line with the Directive wherever the wording allows it.

The Real Risk Isn't the Directive. It's the Fragmentation.

Strip away the country-by-country detail, and one pattern holds across every multinational employer we've talked to. The operational risk isn't that any single country's rules are strict. It's running one payroll and HR function across countries on entirely different legal timelines for the same law.

Employers who treat this as one compliance project, done once, will find themselves redoing the work country by country, on someone else's timeline.

Employers who instead treat this as an ongoing, multi-jurisdiction tracking problem are the ones who stay ahead of it. That means building pay architecture and reporting processes that can flex as each country catches up.

What This Means If You Already Have People in Italy

If your company employs staff in Italy today — directly, through a local entity, or through an Employer of Record — the obligations above aren't upcoming. They're active now.

This is where the gap becomes concrete between a generic payroll and HR provider and a partner with real Italian labour law expertise. Correctly interpreting "categories of employees performing equal work or work of equal value" requires CCNL-level knowledge of Italian job classification. A pan-EU checklist applied the same way everywhere won't cut it, because markets work differently.

A Practical Readiness Checklist

• Map every EU country where you employ people against the status groups above.
• For Italy specifically: confirm offer letters, interview processes, and existing contracts are already compliant.
• Build a standing process to respond to employee pay-information requests within the applicable deadline.
• Run an internal pay-gap check by job category in each country where you have meaningful headcount.
• Revisit recruitment scripts and templates to remove salary-history questions.
• Set a quarterly review cadence through 2027.

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