Every worker will be able to ask what colleagues earn. Germany's old answer process will not survive Article 7.

Germany has had an individual pay information right since 2018. Under sections 10 to 16 of the EntgTranspG, employees in establishments with more than 200 employees can ask for the median pay of a comparison group of at least six colleagues of the other sex. The federal government's own evaluation found that only a small share of eligible employees ever used it. Most HR departments have handled a handful of requests, or none at all.

Article 7 of the EU Pay Transparency Directive (2023/970) replaces that quiet right with a structurally different one. It removes the headcount threshold, changes what must be disclosed, shortens the deadline, and, most consequentially, obliges employers to remind every worker of the right once a year. The design flaws that kept German request volumes near zero were removed deliberately.

For HR directors and CFOs, the practical question is not whether requests will come. It is whether the organisation can produce a defensible answer within two months when they do. This article sets out what Article 7 requires, how it differs from the EntgTranspG mechanism, and what to prepare while the German transposition law is still pending.

What information can employees request under Article 7?

The core entitlement is broader than most German employers expect. Under Article 7(1), every worker has the right to request and receive, in writing, two things: their own individual pay level, and the average pay levels, broken down by sex, for the categories of workers performing the same work as them or work of equal value.

Three design choices matter here. First, the reference group is not a self-selected "comparison activity" named by the employee, as under the EntgTranspG. It is the category of workers doing equal or equal-value work, which the employer must have established through gender-neutral, objective criteria under Article 4. The employer's own job architecture determines the answer.

Second, the answer is an average broken down by sex, not a median that can be refused when the comparison group is small. The information must be presented in a form accessible to a person with no statistical training, so that an unjustified difference is visible.

Third, the request does not have to come from the worker alone. Under Article 7(2), workers can request the information through their workers' representatives, in Germany typically the works council, or through an equality body. A single works council initiative can therefore generate many parallel requests at once.

The procedural rules are equally specific. Employers must respond within a reasonable time, and in any event within two months of the request (Article 7(4)). If the information provided is inaccurate or incomplete, the worker is entitled to ask for additional clarifications and to receive a substantiated reply. And under Article 7(5), workers cannot be prevented from disclosing their pay for the purpose of enforcing equal pay; contractual pay secrecy clauses to the contrary must be prohibited.

Finally, the right is not passive. Article 7(3) requires employers to inform all workers, every year, that the right exists and how to exercise it. This annual notification duty is the single biggest behavioural difference from the German status quo: the EntgTranspG never required employers to advertise the information right, and uptake stayed marginal. Article 7 builds the reminder into the law.

Why the German information right was rarely used

The EntgTranspG information right failed on volume for identifiable reasons, and each of them is instructive because Article 7 reverses them one by one.

The 200-employee establishment threshold excluded the majority of German workplaces from the start. The median mechanism meant that in smaller or gender-skewed teams, the answer was legally refused: no six colleagues of the other sex in the comparison activity, no number. The employee had to know the right existed, formulate the comparison activity themselves, and wait up to three months. A repeat request was generally only possible after two years. Nothing in the law required the employer ever to mention that the right existed.

The result was predictable. The federal evaluation of the EntgTranspG reported low awareness among employees and low request volumes; for most employers, the information right generated no operational load at all. It is precisely this experience that shaped the Directive's design.

Why Article 7 requests will be a recurring event, not an exception

The annual notification duty changes the arithmetic. Once every worker is reminded annually that they can see the average pay of men and women doing equal-value work, request volumes stop depending on individual initiative and start depending on organisational moments: after the notification email, after a disappointing raise, during collective bargaining, after press coverage of pay gaps. Employers should plan for waves, not single requests.

Works councils amplify this. Because Article 7(2) allows requests through workers' representatives, a works council preparing for negotiations can systematically collect requests across departments. The answers, averages by sex per equal-value category, are far more actionable in a negotiation than the old medians ever were.

There is also a litigation dimension. Under Article 18 of the Directive, once a worker presents facts from which discrimination may be presumed, the burden of proof shifts to the employer, and an employer who has not complied with its transparency obligations will find that failure held against it. An ignored or late Article 7 answer is exactly such a failure. The German Federal Labour Court has already moved in this direction under current law: being paid below the median of the comparison group can suffice as an indicium that shifts the burden to the employer (BAG, 16 February 2023, 8 AZR 450/21).

A pay information answer is therefore never just an HR service task. It is potential evidence. The number disclosed must reconcile with the employer's job evaluation, with its Article 9 pay gap report where one is due, and with whatever the employer would argue in court. Producing these numbers ad hoc, in Excel, per request, is how inconsistencies are created.

Where Germany stands: the old right applies until the new law arrives

Germany missed the transposition deadline of 7 June 2026. As of mid-July 2026, no Referentenentwurf has been published; the responsible ministry (BMBFSFJ) is still in internal coordination, and a final transposition law is generally expected in 2027. The expert commission on low-bureaucracy implementation, which reported in autumn 2025, recommended implementing the Directive's information right largely one to one by amending the EntgTranspG.

Two consequences follow for employers. First, the EntgTranspG mechanism, with its 200-employee threshold and median answer, remains the applicable law for private employers until the German statute changes. A missed transposition deadline does not make the Directive directly binding between private parties; EU directives have no horizontal direct effect. Public-sector employers are in a different position, since sufficiently clear directive provisions can be invoked against the state.

Second, the delay is preparation time, not a reprieve. The reporting timeline illustrates why: the EU baseline sets the first pay gap reports for 7 June 2027 for employers with 250 or more employees, and for German employers the first report is currently expected around 2028 on reference year 2027 data, because of the late transposition. The Article 7 information right, by contrast, is not tied to reporting cycles or reference years. Once the German law takes effect, requests can arrive immediately, from any employee, in companies of any size.

What employers should do now

The sequencing matters, because the slow steps are the ones furthest from the request letter.

1. Build equal-value categories first. This is the long pole. Grouping the workforce with objective, gender-neutral criteria takes weeks to months, requires works council communication in Germany, and is the prerequisite for both Article 7 answers and Article 9 reports. Start before the German law forces the timeline.
2. Assemble the full pay picture. Consolidate base salary, bonuses, overtime, allowances and benefits per employee. If variable components live in a different system than base pay, integrate them now, not during a running two-month deadline.
3. Compute and review the averages before anyone asks. Run the by-sex averages per category internally. If a category shows a gap you cannot explain with objective factors, you want to discover that before an employee, a works council or a court does.
4. Design the response workflow. Define the intake channel, who validates the category assignment, who signs off the answer, and how the two-month clock is tracked. Decide in advance how you handle small groups where an average would expose an individual's pay.
5. Audit employment contracts for pay secrecy clauses. Confidentiality clauses covering the employee's own pay are on borrowed time. Remove them from templates now and plan the handling of legacy contracts.
6. Prepare the annual notification. Draft it once, calendar it, and coordinate it with the works council. A well-managed notification with a clear process signals control; a legally forced, improvised one signals the opposite.

The unifying principle: every number disclosed under Article 7 should come from the same data foundation as the pay gap report and the internal analysis. One methodology, one set of categories, one source of truth. Employers who treat information requests, reporting and remediation as separate exercises will eventually publish numbers that contradict each other.

Article 7 turns pay transparency from an annual reporting obligation into a standing operational capability. The employers who fare well will be those for whom the two-month deadline is a formality, because the answer already exists before the question arrives.