must I publish the pay gap report publicly or keep it internal

Reporting goes to an authority, not automatically to the website

The gender pay gap report is primarily intended for notification purposes, not to be published as a press release. The data that the report must contain — such as the pay differences between men and women per category — goes to the authority designated for this purpose, so that supervision is possible and employees and their representatives can request the outcome. Whether, on top of this, an obligation arises to actively disclose the figures publicly, on your own website for example, is a question that the Dutch implementation of the directive must answer. At this moment, it is not yet established how the Netherlands will arrange this.

This makes it a matter to not get ahead of yourself on in the meantime: what exactly must be made public later and what can remain internal depends on the choices made during implementation. However, it is clear that the obligation to report itself is not up for discussion, and that the question "public or not" is separate from the question from how many employees reporting must take place. Employers who are already thinking about the content of the report would do well to first focus on what data must be included in a gender pay gap report, so that the form of publication is a second step later.

What Article 9 does and does not regulate

Article 9 of Directive (EU) 2023/970 describes what data the report must contain, and to whom it is made available, but does not explicitly regulate an obligation for public disclosure on, for example, a website. How the Netherlands will transpose that aspect of the directive into national rules is not yet established; for the current status of that transposition, the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment is the appropriate source.