The short answer
The reporting obligation on the gender pay gap applies from one hundred employees, and that threshold is linked to the employer as a legal entity — not automatically to a location or to the entire group of companies to which you belong. If you have one legal entity with multiple offices or workplaces, you count those employees in principle together. If you have multiple separate legal entities within one group, the question of whether and how those counts are combined has not been worked out in the same way in every EU country.
This is immediately the core of what you need to watch out for: the EU directive itself names the threshold, but the precise definition of "employer" for the count is filled in by the national legislator. As long as implementation in your country has not fully crystallized, the safest assumption is that you count per legal entity, with extra attention if you are part of a group within which staff move from one employer to another within the group.
What counts as employer
In the practice of personnel administration, the employer is usually the entity with which the employment contract is concluded and which appears on the payslip. For the reporting obligation, it makes sense that the same entity serves as the starting point. So if you have two locations that fall under one trade register entry and one legal entity, you count those employees together to determine whether you reach the hundred-employee threshold.
It becomes more complex in a group: a holding company with multiple subsidiaries, each with its own legal personality and its own workforce of, say, thirty to forty employees. On paper, none of the subsidiaries individually reaches one hundred. Whether this also means that no reporting obligation arises for the group as a whole is a question that the directive does not answer in so many words and which can be filled in differently per member state.
Why this can differ per country
The directive establishes a minimum framework and gives member states room in transposing it into national law. This also applies to definitions such as "employer" and the way group relationships are taken into account. Some countries can align with existing labour law on "co-determination at group level" or "consolidation rules", other countries may opt for a strictly formal interpretation per legal entity. As long as this has not been established for each country, it is not possible to say in general terms how your own structure will be assessed.
This is precisely why a generic blog post or a rule of thumb on the internet will not get you far here: the outcome depends on the legislation in the country where the employees in question are employed, and that legislation can also change as implementation continues. consult the knowledge bank for the status per country gives you a current overview without you having to search through all national legal texts yourself.
What this means for your own count
If you are the director of an installation company with two locations, or the HR manager of a group with multiple subsidiaries, the first step is simply to establish under which legal entity or entities your employees fall and how many that is per entity. That is a factual exercise, not a legal one: you count the employment contracts, not the physical locations.
After that, the relevant question is whether your situation is close to the threshold. If you have significantly fewer than one hundred employees per legal entity and there is no reason to assume that the headcounts are combined, then the reporting obligation is not yet a matter for you. If you are near the threshold, or if there is a group structure where staff easily switch between entities, it is worth keeping this point under close review and periodically checking whether any new clarity has emerged.
How to make this transparent now
Because the obligations without a threshold — such as the salary range in the job posting and the prohibition on asking for the current salary — apply to you anyway, regardless of your workforce size, it makes sense to keep these two tracks separate. The reporting threshold of one hundred employees is a separate issue that becomes particularly relevant once you are near that limit.
With a few questions about your structure and workforce size you get an initial indication of where you probably stand, without having to work through the national legislation yourself first. If you are unsure whether your specific group structure falls under the aggregation rule, that is a question best put to a legal advisor or checked with the competent authority in the country in question — payria.eu structures and calculates, but does not pass judgment on your individual situation.
If you would first like to see how we obtain our information and why the source reference appears with each answer, you can read that on our page on our methodology. And if your specific question is not yet there, check the frequently asked questions about thresholds and headcount counting or take the free quick scan to see in a few minutes which topics already apply to your company.