Your job ads will soon need a salary figure, and you can no longer ask candidates what they earn now

Most of the attention on the EU Pay Transparency Directive has gone to the annual pay gap report. That is the obligation with the headline numbers and the 2027 and 2028 deadlines. But for many employers the first practical change will arrive somewhere else entirely: in the next job they advertise.

Article 5 of Directive 2023/970 regulates pay information before employment. It gives applicants the right to know the starting salary or pay range for a role before they interview, and it prohibits employers from asking candidates about their current or previous pay. These are not reporting duties that scale with company size. They attach to the act of recruiting, which means a 120-person manufacturer and a 4,000-person bank are equally bound the moment the rule is in national law.

For German HR teams, one half of Article 5 is a sharp break with current practice. The Entgelttransparenzgesetz of 2017 created an individual right to pay information for existing employees, but it never touched recruitment, and it never banned the salary-history question. The Directive does both. This article sets out what Article 5 requires, what changes for German employers specifically, and what to do before the rule lands.

What Article 5 actually requires

Article 5 has four distinct obligations, and it is worth separating them because they fail in different ways. The pay-information duty is a process change. The salary-history ban is a behavioural change. The gender-neutral vacancy duty is a content change. And the non-discriminatory process duty is a governance change.

The pay-information duty is the one applicants will notice. Employers must provide the initial pay level or its range, set on objective and gender-neutral criteria, in a way that allows an informed and transparent negotiation. The Directive names the published vacancy notice as one acceptable channel, or the information can be given before the interview. It does not mandate that every job advert carry a number, but in practice a stated range in the posting is the cleanest way to comply, and several member states are moving toward exactly that.

The salary-history ban is the obligation that changes daily behaviour the most. In a typical German recruitment process, the candidate's current salary is asked early, often in the first screening call, and it anchors the offer. Article 5 removes that anchor. The employer can no longer base the offer on what the candidate earned before, because it can no longer ask. The offer must instead be set against the role's own pay range and criteria.

This connects directly to the equal-pay logic the rest of the Directive is built on. When pay is anchored to salary history, historical gaps follow people from job to job: a woman underpaid in one role carries that figure into the negotiation for the next. By cutting the link to prior pay, Article 5 is designed to stop the gap from being inherited. That is the mechanism, and it is why the ban is not a peripheral formality but a core part of the design.

Why this is a bigger shift for German employers than for most

Germany starts from an unusually weak base on recruitment pay transparency, which means the Directive moves it further than it moves countries that already regulate hiring pay. The existing Entgelttransparenzgesetz applies to employees who are already on the payroll. It gives them, at firms above 200 employees, a right to ask how their pay compares to the median of colleagues of the other sex doing comparable work. It says nothing about applicants, nothing about job adverts, and nothing about the salary-history question.

The German expert commission that reported in late 2025 recommended amending the existing law rather than writing a new one, and the Parliamentary State Secretary described the goal in January 2026 as a low-bureaucracy, one-to-one implementation of the Directive. A one-to-one implementation means Article 5 enters German law more or less as written. The practical consequences for a German employer are concrete.

The threshold point in the bottom row is the one that catches employers by surprise. A company with 140 employees may reasonably believe it sits below the reporting obligations and has time. On recruitment, that belief is wrong. Article 5 carries no headcount floor. Any employer hiring into a role covered by the relevant national law must give pay information and must not ask about pay history.

Where the exposure sits

The risk in Article 5 is not the disclosure itself. It is the gap between the number you publish and the pay you actually run. The moment a range goes into a job advert, it becomes a public statement about what the role is worth, and it can be compared against what your current employees in that role are paid.

If a new hire is brought in near the top of a published range while existing colleagues doing equal-value work sit well below it, the company has created a documented, visible inconsistency. Under the Directive's wider architecture, an unexplained pay difference between people doing equal or equivalent work is exactly what triggers scrutiny, and Article 18 shifts the burden of proof to the employer once a worker shows facts suggesting discrimination. A published range that does not match internal reality hands a claimant those facts.

This is why Article 5 cannot be treated as a recruitment-team formatting change. The range is only as defensible as the pay structure behind it. An employer that has grouped its roles by equal value, set ranges on objective and gender-neutral criteria, and can show why each role sits where it does, can publish with confidence. An employer that sets a range by instinct in order to fill a vacancy is publishing a liability.

What to do before the rule lands

German transposition is not yet in force, but the direction is fixed and the recruitment obligations are among the simplest to transpose, so the lead time may be short. Three actions prepare an employer without waiting for the final statute.

1. Build defined pay ranges per role from a job evaluation, not from instinct. Group your roles by equal value using objective, gender-neutral criteria, and attach a range to each group. This is the single piece of work that makes Article 5 compliance safe rather than risky, and it is the same evaluation you will need for pay gap reporting. Start here, because everything else depends on it.
2. Remove the salary-history question from your process now. Audit your application forms, screening scripts, and applicant-tracking system for any field or question that asks current or previous pay, and take them out. This is a behavioural change that takes time to embed across hiring managers and recruiters, so beginning before the law forces it avoids a scramble later. Train interviewers to anchor offers to the role's range instead.
3. Reconcile your published ranges against your existing pay. Before any range goes public, compare it to what current employees in equal-value roles actually earn. Where the advert would sit above internal pay, you have found a gap that needs explaining or fixing, ideally before it is documented in a job posting. This reconciliation is the control that stops Article 5 from creating evidence against you.

The obligation that arrives before the report

The pay gap report is the part of the Directive that employers have been told to fear, but it is the recruitment rules that will change behaviour first, and at companies of every size. A salary figure in the advert and the end of the salary-history question are not administrative details. They turn pay structure into a public, comparable statement, and they remove the workaround German employers have leaned on to set offers. The companies that treat a job range as something to be defended, anchored to a real job evaluation, will publish without exposure. The companies that treat it as a field to fill in will be publishing the first line of someone else's equal-pay claim.