Yes, you can prepare part of the gender pay gap report yourself: gather the data, classify your jobs into categories of equal or equivalent work, and get your basic administration in order. The more challenging part is the calculation itself: calculating the gender pay gap per category in a way that aligns with what the directive requires, with the correct adjustments and without small input errors causing large deviations in the result. This is where most companies with one hundred or more employees run into difficulties.
Whether it makes sense to do it yourself depends mainly on your company size and the quality of your job classification. A company with a straightforward organisational structure and a clear classification into job categories has less calculation work than a company with many tailor-made jobs, shift work, or variable pay components. The reporting obligation itself applies from one hundred employees onwards; how that threshold is counted and which documents are needed for it can be found in the knowledge base.
What you can reasonably do yourself
The preparatory steps are close to work you are already doing: getting an overview of jobs, salary scales and working conditions in order, and determining which jobs are comparable to each other in terms of responsibility, complexity and required skills. Gathering the source data per employee — job, salary, seniority, hours worked — is also something that can be done internally, especially if your personnel administration is already well structured.
Where doing it yourself becomes more complicated is in translating that data into categories that meet the standard of equal or equivalent work. This is not a matter of putting job titles side by side, but of applying objective, gender-neutral criteria. An incorrect classification carries through to the rest of the report: if two jobs are wrongly placed in the same category, the calculated gender pay gap for that category will not be correct, regardless of how carefully you calculate afterwards. the classification into categories explained provides a good starting point to see what that process involves.
Where the calculation becomes error-prone
Once the categories are determined, a gender pay gap must be calculated per category and, if it comes to five per cent or more, further analysed. That calculation is not higher mathematics in itself, but it is sensitive to small inconsistencies: an incorrectly converted part-time factor, a bonus that is included in one category but not in another, or a category that is too small to produce a meaningful result. This can be done manually in a spreadsheet, but the risk of silent errors increases as the number of categories and employees grows.
This is precisely the difference between doing it yourself and using a system that structures the calculation work. A calculation module based on your own job classification calculates the gender pay gap per category in a consistent way and signals where a difference of five per cent or more occurs, without you having to check every formula yourself. What such a system does not do — and should not do — is judge whether a difference found is justified. That remains an assessment that rests with you and, where necessary, with a legal advisor.
When outsourcing makes more sense
For smaller employers without reporting obligations, handling the preparatory steps themselves can be entirely sufficient; the main benefit lies in a clear job classification and consistent vacancy text. Once you do fall under reporting obligations, the risk of incorrect job category classification or calculation errors weighs more heavily, because the outcome becomes externally visible and can have consequences for the six months following a signal.
The question is therefore less "can I do this myself" and more "how large an error margin do I find acceptable". A short obligation check helps you first establish what exactly applies to your organization, before you decide how to approach the calculation work. This way you know whether you need to arrange something now or whether the reporting obligation does not yet apply to you.
Do you want to know where payria.eu sources the information for the classification and calculation work, and how the calculation module relates to what you have already prepared? See how the system is structured or first take the free obligation check to see whether the reporting obligation already applies to your organization. For a complete overview of all steps around the gender pay gap reporting, you can also consult the knowledge base, without needing an account for that.