There is no fixed number of days that applies to every organisation. The processing time for a pay transparency request depends on three things: how quickly you identify and register the request, whether your job classification and remuneration data are already in order, and which deadline the applicable legislation in your Member State attaches to the response. Organisations that have done no preparation often lose weeks simply finding the correct figures.
The Directive requires employers to provide employees, on request, with information about their individual pay level and the average pay level of employees performing the same work or work of equal value, broken down by gender. How that obligation is transposed into a response deadline varies by Member State and is not equally developed everywhere. For your situation, the exact deadline is therefore something to check against national law or consult a lawyer about, not something to take as established from a blog post.
The steps that determine processing time
A pay transparency request goes through a series of steps in practice, regardless of the exact deadline attached to it. First, the request must be recognised as such and recorded somewhere, because an informal question to a manager counts just as much as a formal letter to HR. Next, it must be determined which job category the requester belongs to and who makes up the comparison group: colleagues doing the same work or work of equal value. The pay data of that group are then collected and the average calculated, and only then can the response be drafted and sent.
Each step can cause delays. If the job classification is not yet based on objective, gender-neutral criteria, that comparison group essentially needs to be determined anew before a meaningful answer is possible. This is exactly where organisations stumble in practice: not on the question itself, but on the lack of a structure to answer the question quickly. In the knowledge base on the right to information it is set out what can and cannot be asked in such a request, and what a complete answer must minimally contain.
Where things go wrong in practice
The most common delay occurs when the comparison group has not been determined in advance. An HR manager receiving a request for the first time must then improvise: who does comparable work, on what criteria, and is that consistent with how other requests have been handled before? Without a documented job classification, there is a risk that each request is answered anew and at the person's own discretion, which not only costs time but can also lead to inconsistent answers.
A second bottleneck is ownership. In many SMEs, pay information is scattered across payroll administration, an external payroll service and loose Excel files with management. Before anyone knows where the correct figures are, some of the available time has already elapsed. A third bottleneck is the lack of a fixed format: if every response is drafted from scratch, the drafting itself takes unnecessarily long, while the content is largely the same.
None of these bottlenecks concern whether a pay difference is justified. That is a separate, substantive assessment that is not solved by structure or speed. This is only about the question of how much time the process takes to reach an answer.
What setting things up in advance saves
Organizations that have already established job categories and know where compensation data is located can typically handle an information request within a few working days, regardless of the exact statutory timeframe. The difference lies in the preparation: a documented classification into job categories, a designated point of contact for such requests, and a template for the response itself. This is also what the paid workflow from Payria is built on: the statutory timeframe is incorporated into it, and the request follows a fixed route from registration to response instead of having to figure out who is responsible for what each time.
Whether your organization is already subject to this obligation and what exactly applies to your situation can be verified via the obligation checker with an indication in a few questions. How the information on the site is created and maintained can be found on the page on our working methods. For those who want to know what the workflow for information requests concretely entails and what a subscription costs for it, that can be found on the subscription overview.
The quickest path to clarity is not to figure out the exact timeframe, but to get in order what is needed for it: a clear job classification and an overview of where the data is located. Start without obligation with the free compliance check to see where your organization currently stands.