There is no fixed fee for handling a pay transparency request. The pay transparency rules do not prescribe a cost item; what you pay is in the time your organization spends gathering, checking, and reporting back the requested information. How much that is depends on how your remuneration policy currently stands.
The key factor is whether you already have a gender-neutral job classification and a documented remuneration policy. If you do, a request is mainly a matter of looking up and converting into a response. If you don't, the initial investigation must be done the moment an employee asks for it, and that demonstrably takes more time than when it is set up in advance.
Where the time goes
A pay transparency request calls for three things: determining which category of equal work the employee falls into, obtaining the average remuneration within that category, and presenting that in a way that is correct and traceable. Without an existing classification, that job classification must first be created, and that affects not just the one employee asking, but in fact the entire organization. With a classification already in place, it is largely a matter of linking the correct figures to the correct category.
In addition, the number of requests you receive matters. A single request from one employee is different from a series of requests in succession, for example because colleagues inform each other about their right to ask. A procedure that is established with the first request does not need to be reinvented for the second and third request.
Internal time versus external costs
For most SMEs, the costs of a pay transparency request are not in an external invoice but in internal hours: from HR, from a manager who must provide figures, sometimes from an external adviser if the outcome is unclear or if there is doubt about the legal side. The latter is also the only part on which we make no statement: whether a pay difference is justified and what that means legally is up to a lawyer or the competent supervisory authority, not up to a system that structures and calculates.
A systematic procedure mainly reduces repeat costs. Once the job classification is documented with objective, gender-neutral criteria, and the remuneration policy is on paper, each subsequent request is a matter of applying rather than investigating again. That is exactly what the workflow for pay transparency requests on payria.eu is built on: the statutory deadline is included, and the underlying classification and documents are ready when the basics are in order. In the knowledge base with explanations per topic you will find background on what a pay transparency request exactly entails and what an employee may ask.
What is free and what is not
The vacancy check and the duty check are free to use without an account, as is finding every rule in the official text. What is paid for is the system around it: the job classification itself, the remuneration policy with the associated documents, and the workflow that structures a pay transparency request with the deadline included. On the pricing page with the subscription options you can see what that includes and what does not. The difference between a one-time investigation and a system that is already in place is usually the largest cost item you can influence yourself.
Whether your organization falls under the obligations that come with a pay transparency request, and what must already be arranged for that, you can determine by asking a few questions via the duty check that maps out your situation. More about how payria.eu arrives at its answers and where the information comes from, you can read on the page about how it works.
Do you want to know where your own organization stands before an actual request comes in? The free quick-scan gives you a first indication in just a few minutes, without needing to create an account.