What requirements does the law place on job evaluation?

Four objective criteria determine the classification

Job evaluation is based on four criteria: skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions. These are the standards used to compare jobs with each other to determine whether they are equivalent — not the job title, not the seniority of the person performing the job, and not what has been customary within the organisation so far. The requirement is that the criteria are objective and gender-neutral: they must not, directly or indirectly, work to the advantage of one gender. A classification system that, for example, weighs physical effort heavily but mental strain hardly at all, can therefore have unequal effects between jobs that are predominantly performed by men or by women.

This obligation has no minimum threshold in terms of number of employees — it applies to the remuneration structure as such, not only from a certain company size. For private employers in the Netherlands, this is not yet a binding obligation: the bill transposing the directive is before the Lower House and still needs to pass both chambers. The situation is different for the public and semi-public sector, because the transposition deadline for the directive has already passed and the government as an employer may already be directly bound by it. If you now set up a job classification based on these criteria, you are not therefore ahead of something that could still change: the criteria themselves are fixed in the directive, only the moment when the obligation for private employers takes effect is still not fixed.

Article 4(4) of the Pay Transparency Directive

The four criteria are explicitly stated in Article 4(4) of Directive (EU) 2023/970. The absence of a threshold follows from the same provision: where the directive sets a minimum number of employees, such as for reporting, this is explicitly mentioned — for the remuneration criteria, no such threshold exists. The status of the Dutch bill can be tracked via the bill page of the Lower House.