Article 6 asks how you set pay and how it progresses. Most employers have never written the answer down.

Most companies preparing for the EU Pay Transparency Directive are preparing for a report. Article 6 is not a report. It is a rule about how salaries get decided in the first place, and it applies every day, not once a reporting cycle.

The obligation is short. Employers must make easily accessible to their workers the criteria used to determine pay, pay levels and pay progression, and those criteria must be objective and gender-neutral. There is no headcount threshold for the core duty. Member states may exempt employers with fewer than 50 workers from the pay-progression element only, which means a company in the 250-to-2,000 range that this directive was written for has nothing to exempt.

That makes Article 6 different in kind from the parts of the Directive that get the attention. There is no filing date to plan backwards from, no penalty tied to a missed submission. Instead there is a question a labour inspectorate, a works council or an individual employee can ask at any time: on what objective basis was this salary set? For most employers, the honest answer today is a mix of negotiation, market feeling and what the last person in the role was paid. None of that is objective, gender-neutral or written down.

A report is something you produce. A pay-setting rule is something you already have, whether or not you have written it down.

What does Article 6 actually require?

Three things, and each is doing distinct work.

1. Criteria that are objective

Pay, pay levels and progression have to be tied to criteria that can be stated and defended, not to the outcome of an individual negotiation. Objective does not mean rigid. It means the reason a role sits where it sits on the pay structure can be explained by reference to factors like the demands of the work, the level of responsibility, required qualifications and experience, rather than by who asked for what.

2. Criteria that are gender-neutral

The criteria must not, directly or indirectly, favour one sex. Indirect is the harder half. A criterion that looks neutral on its face, such as continuous years of service or full-time availability, can systematically disadvantage women if it is applied without thought to how careers actually run. The Directive is explicit that criteria should be applied so that skills more often associated with women, including interpersonal and caregiving competencies, are not undervalued.

3. Criteria that are easily accessible

Accessible is a higher bar than available on request. The worker should be able to find, without asking and without friction, the basis on which their pay and their route to a higher salary are decided. A criteria framework that exists only in the compensation team's heads, or in a spreadsheet no employee can see, does not meet it.

Read together, these three requirements convert pay-setting from a private, case-by-case act into a published system. That is a larger change than a once-a-year report, because it touches every hiring, every promotion and every annual raise.

Why "objective and gender-neutral" is harder than it sounds

The reason most employers cannot write their criteria down is that the real criteria are ones the Directive does not allow.

Ask a compensation lead why two people in comparable roles are paid differently, and the truthful answers tend to be that one negotiated harder, one came in at a moment when the market was hot, or one arrived on a higher salary from a previous employer that was then carried forward. These are the mechanics of how pay actually gets set in most companies. They are also, in Germany, precisely the factors the courts have refused to accept.

The Federal Labour Court held in 2023 that stronger negotiation is not an objective criterion for a pay difference between the sexes, that a blanket market-value argument cannot be invoked without concrete proof of genuine recruitment difficulty, and that prior salary history is not a legitimate justification. We examined those rulings in detail in a separate article on the explanations German courts have already rejected. The logic runs straight into Article 6. If a factor cannot justify an existing gap after the fact, it cannot be a sound, objective basis for setting pay in the first place.

The criteria most employers actually use are the ones the courts have already thrown out.

This is where Article 6 quietly does the heaviest lifting in the Directive. The reporting obligation measures the gap. Article 6 goes at its source, the pay architecture that produced the gap, and asks the employer to rebuild that architecture on defensible ground before a single number is published.

How Article 6 connects to the report you are actually worried about

The criteria Article 6 asks you to document are not a separate exercise from the Article 9 report. They are its foundation.

The report groups employees into categories of workers performing equal work or work of equal value, then measures the pay gap within each group. Those groupings, under Article 4, must themselves be built from objective, gender-neutral criteria. The pay-setting criteria in Article 6 and the job-evaluation criteria in Article 4 are two views of the same underlying pay architecture. Get them right once and both obligations draw on the same source.

The same criteria also answer the individual questions. Under Article 7, a worker can ask for their own pay level and the average pay, broken down by sex, for the category doing equal work. An employer that has documented, accessible pay criteria can answer that request from a standing document. An employer that has not will be assembling a justification in the two-month window the Directive allows, under exactly the wrong conditions.

What German employers should do now

The work is mostly documentation and testing, not new systems. It is also work that does not compress well, which is the argument for starting before the national law fixes a date.

1. Write down the criteria you already use. Every company has an implicit pay logic. The first task is to make it explicit: what determines the band a role sits in, what moves someone up within it, what triggers a promotion. Naming the real rules is the step most employers skip.
2. Strip out the factors that will not survive. Remove individual negotiation, prior salary and unevidenced market-rate claims as stated bases for pay. Where a genuine recruitment difficulty justified a premium, hold the evidence for it rather than the assertion.
3. Test the remaining criteria for indirect bias. Check whether service-based progression penalises parental leave, whether full-time availability is doing hidden work, and whether skills more common in female-dominated roles are undervalued.
4. Make the progression criteria explicit too. Article 6 names pay progression separately. Promotion routes and step increases need stated, gender-neutral criteria, not just starting pay.
5. Agree the framework with the works council. In Germany, pay principles fall under section 87(1) no. 10 of the Betriebsverfassungsgesetz, a genuine co-determination right. The criteria are far easier to agree as a forward-looking framework than to defend after a contested pay gap report. We set out that dynamic in our article on works councils and the Directive.
6. Make the result accessible. Publish the criteria where employees can find them, in the handbook or on the intranet, so that "easily accessible" is a fact rather than a promise.

Software does the analytical part of this well. It can hold the job architecture, test criteria for indirect effects across the whole workforce, and keep an audit trail that makes a pay decision reconstructible later. It does not decide which criteria an employer adopts, and it cannot conduct the works council negotiation. Those remain matters for the employer and its counsel.

The obligation that changes the everyday, not the calendar

The reporting deadlines are the visible edge of the Directive, and they will move as Germany transposes late. Article 6 will not move, because it is not tied to a date. It asks a permanent question about how an employer sets pay, and it requires the answer to be objective, gender-neutral and open to the people it affects. Employers that treat this as documentation to be produced under deadline will find they are also rewriting the criteria at the same time, which is the hardest possible moment to do it. Those that make their pay-setting legible now will find that the report, the individual answers and the works council conversation are all resting on ground they have already prepared.