No, not entirely. The European Directive on transparency of remuneration sets a common basis that applies in all Member States, but it is a Directive and not a Regulation. This means that each country must transpose the rules into national legislation itself, and has room for its own choices in doing so. The core is the same everywhere, the implementation is not.
For an employer with staff or vacancies in one EU country, that difference is mainly theoretical. For an employer with operations in multiple Member States, it is concrete: the salary range in a vacancy, the prohibition on asking about current salary and the right to information of workers apply everywhere, but the precise thresholds, the sanctions and the supervisory authority may differ from country to country.
A Directive is not a Regulation
A European Regulation applies directly in each Member State without the intervention of the national legislator. A Directive works differently: it sets out an objective and a floor, and leaves it to each Member State to decide how that objective is achieved. As long as the national law does not fall below the European minimum, a country may be stricter. Some Member States choose to do so, others align as closely as possible with the European text. The transposition deadline has now passed, but not every country has implemented it at the same pace or with the same interpretation.
This makes the Directive different from, for example, privacy legislation, where one Regulation applies directly throughout the Union. For transparency of remuneration, you therefore need to read not only the European text, but also the national law of each country where you are an employer. search the knowledge base by subject provides an overview, broken down by what is fixed at European level and what is filled in by each country.
What remains the same in every EU country
The basic obligations prescribed by the Directive apply without exception everywhere. A vacancy must contain a salary range, a candidate may not be asked what he or she currently earns, job evaluation must be based on gender-neutral criteria, and workers receive a right to information about remuneration within their category. The idea of a reporting obligation from a certain company size onwards, and of a signal when there is a remuneration difference of a certain magnitude, also appears in every country. These are the elements on which you can assume they apply without further investigation, regardless of which Member State you are active in.
Where countries can deviate
The differences are mainly in the figures and the implementation. The precise threshold for the reporting obligation may be lower in some countries than the European starting point. The sanctions for failure to comply with the rules, and which authority oversees compliance, are determined nationally and vary. The exact procedure for an information request, such as the form in which an employer must respond, can also be filled in slightly differently from country to country, even though the core of the right is the same. In addition, the date on which the national law actually came into force may differ from country to country, which means that an obligation in one country has applied for longer than in another.
What this means for employers with multiple operations
If you are an employer only in the Netherlands, the Dutch transposition law is your only reference point. If you have staff or vacancies in multiple EU countries, a central remuneration policy that is identical everywhere is not automatically sufficient: the basis may be the same, the details are not the same per country. This applies in particular to the reporting threshold, the supervisory authority and the sanctions.
For that reason, country-specific differences are precisely the area where structuring adds value: not by judging which difference is justified, but by making clear which obligation applies in which country at which time. In the payria.eu subscription, those country-specific sections are included alongside the job classification and the reporting module; via viewing the subscription structure you can see what it contains. How that information is compiled and what it is based on is explained at the methodology behind the knowledge base.
Do you first want to know whether your organisation is subject to the reporting obligation at all, and in which country that precisely applies? get an indication in a few questions is free and non-binding, and shows which obligations are relevant for your situation before you look at the country-specific details.