Which pay transparency obligations also apply to small employers?

Most obligations apply regardless of the number of employees

An employer with five employees has the same obligations as an employer with five hundred, except on the point of reporting. Whoever posts a vacancy provides the job applicant with the starting salary or its range, and this happens before the interview or is already in the text itself. Asking a job applicant about their current or previous salary is not permitted. The remuneration determined thereafter is based on objective and gender-neutral criteria — skills, effort, responsibility, working conditions — and not on what someone earned or dared to ask for previously. An employee can also request what the average remuneration level is in their category of work of equal value, broken down by gender. Only in the event of a dispute over remuneration discrimination does the burden of proof shift to the employer, as soon as the employee puts forward facts that give rise to suspicion of discrimination. Only the annual or triennial reporting on remuneration differences, and the joint remuneration assessment that may follow from it, do have a threshold: it begins at one hundred employees.

In the Netherlands this is not yet binding law for private employers: the bill transposing the directive is before the Second Chamber and must still pass both chambers. For employers in the public and semi-public sectors it is different, because the transposition deadline of the directive has already passed and judges have since interpreted national law in a manner consistent with the directive. For the rest there is time to establish the job classification and remuneration policy before the law comes into force, regardless of the size of the organisation.

Basis: articles 4, 5, 7 and 18

That these obligations have no threshold follows directly from the directive: article 5 paragraph 1 and paragraph 2 for the information before the employment relationship and the prohibition on asking about salary history, article 4 paragraph 4 for the objective and gender-neutral criteria, article 7 paragraph 1 for the right to information of employees, and article 18 paragraph 1 for the shift in burden of proof. The threshold of one hundred employees is listed separately in article 9, the reporting obligation.