The information right is the right of an employee to ask the employer in writing for information about compensation: their own salary level, and the average compensation — broken down by gender — of employees who do the same work or work of equal value. This right applies to every employer, regardless of the number of employees; there is no threshold such as the one for the reporting obligation.
The detail that causes the most confusion: an information request rarely concerns one person. The employee does not ask "what does colleague X earn", but is entitled to a comparison at category level — the average within the group of employees in the same or an equivalent position, broken down by gender. That distinction determines what you as an employer must provide, and what you do not.
What an employee may request
The information right typically covers two components: the employee's own individual salary level, and the average compensation of colleagues in a comparable or equivalent job category, broken down by gender. It is therefore a sum and an average, not individual payslips of people with the same name. For employers, this means that the job classification on which such comparisons are based must already exist before the first request arrives — not only after.
The precise scope of what counts as "work of equal value" depends on objective, gender-neutral criteria such as responsibility, required skills and working conditions. Without clear classification, it is difficult to answer a request consistently, let alone to give the same result to two comparable requests.
For whom this right applies
The information right is separate from the threshold of one hundred employees that applies to the reporting obligation. An employer with fifteen employees is therefore just as subject to this obligation as an enterprise with three hundred staff. It is one of the obligations that apply from the first employee, just like the salary range in a job advertisement and the prohibition on asking about a previous salary.
This makes the information right for smaller employers often the first moment when the new rules become concrete: not through a report that lies somewhere in the future, but through a question that could land on your desk tomorrow.
What an information request is not
An information request is not a complaint and not a judgment. The employee asks a question about figures; the employer provides those figures within the framework that the rules set for this. Whether any difference in compensation is justified — by experience, job level, performance or something else — is a question that only becomes relevant after the answer, and you do not answer that question by simply stating a figure.
Conversely, it is also not a licence to speculate. A signal in the figures is exactly that: a signal, not a conclusion. Whoever answers a request, structures and calculates — the interpretation is up to the employer themselves, possibly with legal advice, not to a system that provides the figures.
How to prepare for this
Most time is not lost in formulating an answer, but in gathering the underlying data: who falls into which job category, what averages go with it, and has that classification been applied consistently. Anyone who only figures that out once the first request arrives is already behind the facts.
The knowledge base explains per topic what the information right precisely entails and where that can be found in the official text. the knowledge base with explanations for each obligation. If you want to first know whether and in what form this right already applies to your organization, the compliance check provides an indication in just a few questions in a few questions see what already applies to you. How this indication is created and where the information comes from is explained on the page that outlines that process how this indication is built up.
For the practical side — an established workflow for incoming requests, with the associated deadline and a template for the response — there is the paid part of the system; which components exactly that includes is clearly set out in the subscriptions the overview of what is included per subscription.
Do you have half an hour and want to know where your organization currently stands? The free quick-scan provides an initial indication, without requiring an account.