EU Pay Transparency Gap Calculator
What does the EU Pay Transparency Directive make employers report?
Seven indicators under Article 9: the mean and median gender pay gap, the mean and median gap in variable or complementary pay, the share of women and of men who receive variable pay, the share of women and men in each quartile pay band, and the gap within each category of workers, split into basic and variable pay. A gap of 5% or more in a category that cannot be justified and is not fixed within six months triggers a joint pay assessment.
Member states had until 7 June 2026 to bring Directive (EU) 2023/970 into national law. The largest employers report first; smaller ones follow in later years.
Paste one line per worker and the indicators appear below, worked out in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
Built by Muhammad Shahzeb Anwar, MSc Industrial and Organizational Psychology. It extends the arithmetic of his free Pay Gap Calculator to the Directive's full list of indicators.
Your Article 9 indicators
Runs in your browser. Nothing you type is stored or sent anywhere.
How the gap is defined
The Directive measures the pay gap as the difference between men's and women's average pay level, expressed as a percentage of men's average. Pay level means gross annual pay and the corresponding gross hourly pay; this calculator works on hourly pay, which removes the distortion part-time work causes in annual figures. A positive gap means men are paid more on average; a negative one means women are.
Mean and median are both required for a reason. The mean is pulled up by a handful of very high earners, usually men in senior roles; the median is the middle earner and ignores them. When the mean gap is much larger than the median gap, the gap is concentrated at the top.
Category of workers is the indicator that matters
Indicator (g) compares women and men doing work of equal value: a "category of workers" groups people whose work is of the same or equal value, assessed on objective, gender-neutral criteria such as skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions. It is the indicator that can lead to action. The whole-company gap mostly tells you where women and men sit in the organisation; the category gap tells you whether the same work is paid differently.
How you define the categories decides the result, which is why the Directive asks for them to be set with gender-neutral criteria, agreed where there are workers' representatives. Put each worker's category in the second column exactly as you have defined it.
The 5% trigger
Article 10 requires a joint pay assessment, carried out with workers' representatives, when the reporting shows an average pay difference of at least 5% between women and men in any category of workers, the employer has not justified it on objective, gender-neutral criteria, and it has not been remedied within six months of the report. The flag above marks categories at 5% or more in either direction; it cannot tell you whether the difference is justified.
What this will not tell you
This computes the indicators from what you paste. It does not decide your categories of workers, check whether a difference is justified, or know your member state's transposing law, which may add rules on hours, part-time conversion, rounding or small-number suppression. Reporting thresholds and dates depend on employer size and on the national law. Pay in kind and benefits have to be valued in money before they can go in the variable column.
Questions people actually ask
When do employers have to report under the EU Pay Transparency Directive?
The transposition deadline was 7 June 2026. Employers with 150 or more workers report first (by 7 June 2027 for the 2026 calendar year), employers with 100 to 149 workers by 7 June 2031 and every three years after; those with 250 or more report every year. National laws can set lower thresholds.
Is the pay gap the same as unequal pay?
No. The overall gap compares the average woman's pay with the average man's across the whole employer, so it mostly reflects who holds which jobs. Unequal pay is different pay for the same work or work of equal value, which is what the category indicator (g) gets closer to.
Why is the gap a percentage of men's pay?
That is how Article 3 of the Directive defines it: the difference between female and male average pay levels expressed as a percentage of the male average pay level.
What counts as variable or complementary pay?
Anything on top of the ordinary basic wage, in cash or in kind: bonuses, commission, overtime premiums, allowances, and benefits valued in money.
Does a 5% gap automatically mean a joint pay assessment?
Only if the difference is in a category of workers, the employer cannot justify it on objective, gender-neutral criteria, and it has not been remedied within six months of the pay report.
Sources
Checked against the text of the law on 16 October 2026. Laws and notified rates change; if a source below has moved on, the source wins over this page.
- Directive (EU) 2023/970 of 10 May 2023 (Pay Transparency Directive), EUR-Lex: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2023/970/oj
- Directive (EU) 2023/970, Official Journal L 132, 17 May 2023 (Articles 3, 9 and 10): http://publications.europa.eu/resource/celex/32023L0970
Cite this tool
Free to use and free to quote. If a figure here is useful in something you are writing, a link back is all that is asked.
Muhammad Shahzeb Anwar, MSc Industrial and Organizational Psychology. EU Pay Transparency Gap Calculator. Shahzeb Speaks. https://www.shahzebspeaks.com/eu-pay-transparency-calculator/
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Need the quartiles and the explanation behind them?
The paid Pay Gap Calculator works out your own pay gap properly: mean, median, and the quartiles that explain it. It runs offline in one file and uploads nothing. It does not produce the Directive's category-of-worker table; this free page does.