Pay transparency in Ireland: getting on the front foot

20th February 2025

Julia Hanna

Ireland is the fourth country (after Germany, Sweden and Poland) to publish draft legislation following the EU Pay Transparency Directive.

The current proposals implement parts of the Directive. We may see a trend of piecemeal adoption across the EU as member states, like Ireland, adapt existing and propose new legislation.

So, what’s been covered so far and what needs to be done to get on the front foot?

Transparency at job recruitment

Employers will need to provide information about salary levels or ranges in job advertisements. This goes further than the EU Directive, that only states candidates are given salary ranges in advance of interview. Research suggests that currently only 43% of employers in Ireland disclose salaries when advertising (69% in the UK) so there’s still some way to go.

It is expected that as the bill progresses, it will become clearer on exactly how detailed the information will need to be so that employers cannot publish such broad salary ranges that they become meaningless.

No more salary history questions

Employers will be prevented from asking a candidate’s past or current pay. The aim is to ensure employers don’t further entrench pay discrimination which may have started elsewhere.

And there’s more to come, as Ireland legislators adopt the rest of the Directive to promote pay equity and transparency by:

requiring organisations to clearly and objectively explain their approach to pay
giving employees the right to request specific pay information, including by gender, of others doing the same or similar roles
mandatory joint pay assessments with worker’s representatives if the gender pay gap is greater than 5%. Unless the gap can be proved to be driven by gender neutral factors.

Changes to pay gap reporting

Again, Ireland is ahead of the game with separate changes afoot this year for gender pay gap reporting. From 2025, the employee threshold is reducing to 50, so many more organisations will need to report. And the reporting deadline is being shortened to five-months (November 2025).

What needs to be done?

So, it’s important to act now so that you’re ready for the legislation. Especially as the burden of proof of pay discrimination now falls upon the employer rather than the claimant. With sanctions including compensation of back pay, legal costs, and fines for violating the Directive.

Step you’ll need to take include:

Establish career levels – assessing the relative size of roles and creating internal levels underpins pay structures and helps you understand any pay gaps. You can buy an off-the-shelf system or develop your own (we can help with this). It doesn’t need to be complex and time consuming with points and review panels. But it does need be clear and systematic.
Develop salary ranges – you’ll need clear salary ranges assigned to each career level, along with a series of pay principles to guide how pay will be set and reviewed. The ranges can then be used on job adverts and shared internally.
Have a policy for new joiner pay – perhaps one of the biggest behaviour changes will be stopping asking about salary history, but it’s one that can be done straight away. Once salary ranges and pay principles are in place, pay decisions can be informed by a defendable rationale.
Prepare your pay gap analysis – if you’re likely to be within the new lower thresholds for gender pay gap reporting, it’s worth getting your processes ready and running the analysis internally ahead of time. That way you can start to understand and investigate pay gaps.
Conduct an equal pay audit – we expect that equal pay audits will become more frequent. Either through information requests from employees or as a result of gender pay gaps wider than 5%. So do an initial assessment now and create an action plan.
Get ready for information requests – Set up processes to deal with pay information requests. To both remind employees each year of their right to this information and to ensure that the information is provided within two months of any request.
Encourage disclosure of protected characteristics – pay gaps are also likely to extend beyond gender to other protected characteristics such as ethnicity and disability. Ensuring your disclosure rates are good can take time and effort to build declaration rates

Even if you’re not in Ireland, the EU Directive is regarded as the global benchmark, so we’d recommend that you get on board so you’re not left behind.

How we can help

At Verditer we are specialists in creating a transparent approach to pay and reward. Do get in touch if you’d like our help with creating pay foundations, or with pay gap reporting.

Follow our LinkedIn company page and sign up for our newsletter to hear about future blogs.

Related Insights

2025 Reward Predictions

We often get asked what’s ‘hot’ in reward, so here’s our predictions on trends for 2025 and beyond.

A pay transparency checklist

Julia provides a helpful 10 point checklist to help with pay transparency.

Contact us

Get in touch today

We’d love to hear from you. To find out how we can partner to get more out of reward, please enter your details below and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.