when exactly does the pay transparency law apply in the Netherlands

No entry date has been established yet

There is still no precise date when the Dutch pay transparency law will come into force: it is bill 36949, and it is still being considered by the Dutch House of Representatives. With a bill that has not yet been adopted, there is also no entry date to mention — that typically only follows after the bill has passed both chambers and a decision has been made about the entry date. Anyone now looking for a concrete day in a concrete month will rightfully come up empty: that date simply does not exist at this moment.

That does not mean nothing is at stake until then. The European directive on which this law is based has its own transposition deadline for member states, and that deadline has already passed for the Netherlands without the national law being ready. What that concretely means for employers — and whether the directive can already play a role without the Dutch law — is set out in what it means that the Netherlands missed the transposition deadline. Anyone wondering whether the directive itself can already be invoked directly will find more about it at applying the EU directive directly.

Where this is evident: the bill and article 34 of the directive

This conclusion follows from the status of bill 36949 on the website of the Dutch House of Representatives, where you can see that the proceedings are still ongoing and no entry provision with a fixed date has been established, and from article 34 of Directive (EU) 2023/970, which regulates the transposition deadline for member states but does not itself determine a Dutch entry date. For the question of whether the law already applies somewhere in part, a good follow-up is whether the pay transparency law has already come into force a good follow-up.