Three of the main obligations in the EU Pay Transparency Directive use categories of workers: requests for pay information, pay gap reporting and the joint pay assessment. How an employer draws its categories therefore shapes what workers are told, what is reported and whether a joint pay assessment is triggered.
A question that comes up is whether existing job architecture levels can serve as categories.
What the Directive requires
Article 3(1)(h) defines a category of workers as workers performing the same work or work of equal value, grouped in a non-arbitrary way on objective, gender-neutral criteria. Article 4(4) requires those criteria to include skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions. The criteria must be agreed with workers’ representatives where there are any. Relevant soft skills must not be undervalued.
The European Commission’s FAQ of 6 August 2026 says categorisation should be based on the value of the work within the organisation. Workers doing different work of the same value should be placed in the same category and pay range. Employers may weight the criteria according to their relevance to the job.
The Directive refers to “gender-neutral job evaluation and classification systems” (Articles 4(2) and 10(4)) and prescribes no specific evaluation method. Recital 10 restates the existing rule that a job classification system used to determine pay must be based on the same gender-neutral criteria and drawn up to exclude discrimination on grounds of sex. A levelling framework linked to salary bands is such a system.
How categories are used
Pay information (Article 7). Workers can request the average pay levels, broken down by sex, for their category. Employers must reply within two months.
Pay reporting (Article 9(1)(g)). Reports include the gender pay gap by category, split between basic pay and complementary or variable components.
Joint pay assessment (Article 10). This is required where pay reporting shows a gap in average pay of at least 5% in any category. The gap must also be unjustified on objective, gender-neutral criteria and unremedied within six months of the report being submitted.
Public procurement (Article 24). Contracting authorities may exclude bidders that have breached pay transparency obligations or have an unjustified pay gap of more than 5% in any category. Member States can make exclusion mandatory in some cases.
Job levelling and job evaluation
Job levelling places roles in a hierarchy using descriptors such as scope, complexity, autonomy and impact. Roles are matched as a whole to the best-fitting level, often within a job family.
Analytical job evaluation rates each role factor by factor against defined factor levels and weightings. The result is a score on one scale for every role, whatever its job family, with a record of how each factor was rated.
Levels can serve as categories where evaluation confirms that roles at the same level are of equal value across job families. A level descriptor applied within each family does not show that a level 4 customer service role and a level 4 engineering role are of equal value. In Brunnhofer (C-381/99), the Court of Justice held that being in the same job category under a collective agreement did not by itself establish equal value.
Setting categories from evaluation scores
A typical approach is:
Evaluate the roles. Cover all roles or a representative sample from every job family and level.
Rank the roles by score. Show each role’s job family, current level and the number of women and men in it.
Decide the number of grades. The current number of levels is a sensible starting point. Fewer grades put more roles in each category. More grades give finer distinctions and more boundaries that the evaluation needs to support.
Set initial score ranges. Ranges can be equal or widen towards the top. The spreadsheet for the point-factor method in the voluntary EIGE and Commission guidelines (March 2026) groups jobs using a standard band of 10% of the maximum score.
Move boundaries to natural breaks. Avoid separating roles with very close scores, particularly where roles mainly done by women would fall into a lower grade than roles mainly done by men.
Compare with current levels. Investigate roles whose score places them in a different grade from their level. Base decisions on the evaluation rather than current pay or status.
Check and document. Check which roles moved or sit near a boundary and whether they are mainly done by one sex. Record each grade’s score range, the reason for each boundary and the decision on each anomaly.
Roles from different job families with scores in the same grade form one category once the boundaries are confirmed. Pay ranges can then be aligned with the grades.
What to look out for
Pay differences at the same level. Roles in the same grade can have different pay ranges by job family because of market premiums. The FAQ says market conditions are less likely to be directly linked to the intrinsic value of a job and should be treated with caution. In Enderby (C-127/92), the Court of Justice accepted that the need to attract candidates could justify only the part of a pay difference attributable to it.
Other sources of difference. Employers can still pay workers in the same category differently on objective, gender-neutral and bias-free criteria such as performance and competence (Recital 17). Starting salary negotiation, protected legacy pay, progression rules and variable pay can all create gaps within a grade. For starting pay, the Directive bars employers from asking applicants about their pay history (Article 5(2)).
Equal value at different levels. Evaluation can show that a role placed at a lower level scores the same as roles above it. Recital 31 says gender-neutral job evaluation detects the undervaluation of jobs typically done by women. Level descriptors focused on expertise or commercial impact can understate demands such as communication, care, emotional effort or working conditions.
Fitting results to the old structure. The EIGE toolkit lists adjusting scores to fit the existing structure and using historical pay to justify disparities as mistakes to avoid. It recommends first considering upward pay adjustments for jobs found to be underpaid for their value.
Category size. Very small categories can bring an average close to revealing an individual’s pay. Article 12(3) lets Member States limit access in such cases to workers’ representatives, labour inspectorates or equality bodies. Broader categories can produce gaps that reflect the mix of job families within them. Those gaps still need to be justified.
Evidence. Workers’ representatives have access to the methodologies used in pay reporting (Article 9(6)). In equal pay claims the burden of proof can shift to the employer (Article 18). The employer needs to be able to show how each role was valued and why each grade boundary sits where it does.
Summary
In my view an existing job architecture does not need to be replaced. Levels can serve as categories once evaluation shows that roles at the same level are of equal value across job families. Job evaluation provides that evidence and the record behind it.
