Pay transparency: What retailers need to know about Ireland’s new rules
Caroline Reidy reports about how the recently introduced EU Pay Transparency Directive will affect your business
Print5 August 2025
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Each EU Member State, including Ireland, must incorporate these provisions of the EU Pay Transparency Directive into national law by June 2026, with reporting guidelines coming into effect in 2027. The new legislation’s goal is to boost pay transparency and tackle gender pay gaps in all sectors, including retail. Here’s what you need to know:
Key employer responsibilities:
Gender pay gap reporting
- Employers will need to report gender pay gap data, broken down by categories of workers that do equal value/equal work, and basic vs. variable pay.
- If there is a pay gap of 5% or more and this cannot be objectively justified, a joint pay assessment with worker representatives will be required.
Pay transparency in recruitment
- Employers will have to disclose salary ranges in job advertisements however there has been major push back on this requirement, so there may be changes to this prior to implementation.
- Employers will not be able to ask candidates about their previous salary history.
Employee rights to pay information
- Employees will have the right to request the average pay levels, broken down by gender, for workers performing the same or equivalent roles.
- Employers will need to provide this information within two months of the request.
Prohibition on pay secrecy
- Employers will not be able to prevent employees from discussing their salaries.
- Pay discrimination cases will in turn have stronger enforcement.
What employers should do now
- Start to review current pay structures to ensure compliance with transparency requirements.
- Prepare for gender pay gap reporting by assessing pay differences across equal worker categories.
- Assess recruitment policies and look to start incorporating salary ranges in job postings & remove all questions on previous history.
- Train HR teams on new obligations, including responding to employee pay information requests.
- Monitor legislative updates, as Ireland is still finalising the Pay Transparency Bill to implement these changes.
Gender pay gap reporting has reduced thresholds this year, meaning more employers than ever are required to prepare these reports. From the 1st of June 2025, employers with 50 or more employees will be required to publish their gender pay gap report, this is a change from the previous year’s requirement of businesses with 100 employees or more.
The report needs to factor in all employees, even those who are part-time or have a fixed term contract and it must also factor in basic salaries, bonuses and benefits of any kind. These reports will also be fully searchable, allowing members of the public to more easily compare organisations.
The reporting regulations also require employers to report their gender pay gap noting specific statistics each year, along with the measures that are being taken to eliminate/reduce any gender pay gap.
The key gender pay gap statistics employers are required to report on include:
- mean and median pay gaps;
- mean and median bonus gaps;
- the proportion of men and women that received bonuses;
- the proportion of men and women that received benefits in kind (‘BIK’); and
- the proportion of men and women in each of four equally sized quartiles.
The Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth of Ireland is due to create an online pay gap reporting portal which is expected to be launched in Autumn of this year.
With more employers than ever before needing to prepare for gender pay gap reporting, now’s the time to get ahead. Start identifying any pay gaps and act before the spotlight turns on organisations.
Legal action:
It may seem like the retail sector wouldn’t be heavily affected by new pay transparency laws. However, the ongoing Asda equal pay case in the UK shows just how significant the impact can be.
The case began in 2014 and is centred on whether Asda’s predominantly female shop-floor workers are being paid less than their mostly male counterparts working in warehousing, potentially in breach of equal pay legislation. The claim argues that the shop floor workers were earning up to £3.74 (€4.36) less per hour, despite performing work of equal value to the warehousing staff.
The legal process has three stages. So far, the shop workers have won the first two stages, with courts agreeing that their roles are both comparable and of equal value to those in the warehouse centres. The final stage will be determined by whether Asda can provide a justifiable reason for the pay differences between the groups.
If the claim succeeds, it could set a major precedent for the grocery retail industry potentially costing Asda billions of pounds in back pay and reshaping the structure of pay across the sector.
These UK based cases have implications in Ireland as UK case law is considered persuasive in Irish tribunals and with many retailers operating across Ireland and the UK this may well prompt challenges to uphold equal pay for equal work.
If you require further support or advice relating to HR, please do not hesitate to contact us at info@thehrsuite.com / (066) 7102887.
For more information visit www.thehrsuite.com or read our blog.
© 2025, ShelfLife by Caroline Reidy
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