6 Simple Pay Health Checks for EU Pay Transparency Readiness. Part One: Setting up your data for Success
SkillsTrust Team
9 Sept 2025
• 4 minute read
Pay transparency will become the norm in the EU in 2026. Employees will have a lot more information about comparative pay for colleagues in similar roles. This visibility will mean that past pay anomalies and inconsistencies are likely to be surfaced and discussed. This can be very damaging to employee trust and so there is a strong rationale to check for these issues now and resolve them if needed.
Every company has pay anomalies but this is especially true for companies that have not had structured pay practices in the past (such as pay levels, salary bands etc.).
Small and medium sized companies tend to fall into this category. Faced with pay transparency rules and the need for more structured pay management, SMB employers are also those with small HR teams and no dedicated Total Rewards expertise to help prepare for pay transparency.
If this is the situation that you are in - never fear.
You can quickly get an initial view on the health of your pay using a simple set of checks in Excel.
In this content series, you’ll learn how to prepare your data and perform six easy checks to evaluate pay practices and uncover any irregularities.
The output of this exercise is a pay risk list that you can triage. Triaging the risk list means that you will need to determine which pay issues have an objective, gender-neutral justification and which may require remediation such as a pay adjustment.
With that in mind, let’s get started by pulling & cleaning the necessary data to perform the pay analysis.
Preparing your Data
There are two inputs needed for running these checks:
Simple Job Categories
Pay Dataset
Simple Job Categories
The EU Pay Transparency Directive requires employers to group jobs into categories of work of equal value. This categorisation is necessary to meet various requirements under the directive, such as pay gap reporting and fulfilling employee information rights. For small and medium-sized businesses, job categorisation might sound daunting, but it can be approached in a straightforward way. Here’s how to get started:
Start with simple assumptions about levels and families
A basic framework can be quite simple, with just 5–7 job levels. Some companies might choose to break these levels down further by job family (like Marketing, Sales, or Engineering). If this is the case, a job category would be the combination of a job level and job family as in the example below. The main guiding principle is that roles in the same job category should represent work of equal value (i.e. they are comparators for pay purposes).
Write a description for each level and job family
Write a short description of the criteria required for a job to be assigned to each level and each family. The Directive says that jobs should be categorised based on objective factors including responsibility, skills, effort and working conditions. This might sound abstract but here is a simple example of how you can describe job families & levels in these terms:
Your first draft doesn’t need to be perfect. Even a basic draft framework will give you a foundation to build on and you can add more nuance as you go.
Pay Dataset
When running these checks, we recommend using the pay dataset as described in Article 9 of the EU Pay Transparency Directive.This dataset will be required for EU pay gap reporting. It is a 12 month earnings dataset that covers base, variable and BIK, plus hours worked and gender.
Once you have created job categories & pulled the relevant pay data, you are ready to start conducting your pay gap analysis.
And that’s it! You’re ready to start analysing your pay & job data to understand the pay health of your company.
In the next article, we will focus on the first analysis: Pay Gap within Job categories. Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss that post.
If the data prep is already seeming like a daunting task, feel free to reach out to our team. We can cut out the heavy lifting of job evaluation with our AI-assisted engine, delivering a clear, editable job architecture that categorises work of equal value - aligned with the EU Pay Transparency Directive.
You can book a call to speak with our team here if you have any questions.
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