Five member states have a pay transparency law in force. Germany has not published a draft. A group employing on both sides of that line runs two timetables, not one.

A German group with 720 people in Germany, 180 in Italy, 140 in Poland, 60 in Greece, and 50 in Ireland has no single pay transparency deadline. It has five. Three of them have already begun, and the largest part of the workforce sits in the one country that has not yet written its law.

Most preparation projects are built the other way round. They start from the Directive, take 7 June 2027 as the date, and treat national transposition as an administrative detail to be filled in later. For a group employing in more than one member state, that sequence is backwards. The date that governs a subsidiary is set by the country it employs in, and several of those dates have already passed.

1. Why the Directive is not the instrument that binds you

Article 34(1) required member states to bring the necessary laws into force by 7 June 2026. A directive addresses states, not private employers. Where a state has transposed, the operative text is the national statute, and it is the national statute that a labour inspectorate, a works council, or a court will apply. Where a state has not transposed, a private-sector employer is not yet subject to the new duties, although the existing national equal pay law continues to apply in full.

This produces the position most mid-market groups are now in. The Italian subsidiary is governed by Legislative Decree No. 96 of 7 May 2026, in force since 7 June 2026. The Greek subsidiary is governed by Law 5316/2026, published on 6 July 2026, whose operative obligations begin on 1 November 2026. The German parent is governed by the Entgelttransparenzgesetz of 2017, the existing German pay transparency act, because nothing has replaced it.

Non-communication of transposing measures is the ordinary trigger for proceedings under Article 258 TFEU, which begin with a letter of formal notice. We have found no letter specific to this Directive in the published infringement packages as at 21 September 2026. That matters less to an employer than it sounds. Infringement pressure changes when a national law arrives. It does not change whether the Italian or the Greek law already applies.

2. The Directive is a floor, and every state builds above it differently

Article 1 describes the Directive as setting minimum requirements. Article 27 adds the two rules that follow from that. Member states may introduce or maintain provisions more favourable to workers, and transposition may not be used as the reason to reduce the level of protection that already exists in a country.

Both halves are load-bearing for a cross-border employer. The first means national law can go further, and the clearest current example is France, whose bill would impose seven reporting indicators on employers with 50 or more staff, where the Directive's lowest reporting band begins at 100. The Greek law adds Greek-specific requirements on written pay structures, remediation deadlines, and enforcement that the Directive does not require. The second means implementing the Directive is not a ground for narrowing an existing regime. Ireland is the clearest case: its own gender pay gap reporting duty already reaches employers with 50 or more employees, and transposition is not a reason to cut it back.

The practical consequence is that the question “are we compliant with the Directive?” has no useful answer. The Directive is not a standard an employer can be measured against. It is the lowest common denominator of twenty-seven standards, each of which may sit above it.

3. Which country's rules apply to which part of the workforce?

For most groups the answer is simpler than feared, and the complications are concentrated in a small number of cases.

Under the Directive the reporting bands start at 100 workers. Employers of 250 or more, and of 150 to 249, report for the first time by 7 June 2027, and employers of 100 to 149 first report in 2031. The duty attaches to the employer. In a group, that normally means each employing legal entity, under the law of the member state in which it employs. A German GmbH with an Italian subsidiary has two employers, not one workforce, and the Italian entity's obligations are counted, timed, and filed in Italy. For the individual employment relationship the governing law is determined under the Rome I Regulation. Where the parties have not chosen a law, that is the law of the country in which, or failing that from which, the employee habitually carries out the work, and a chosen law cannot deprive the employee of that country's mandatory protections. Cross-border and remote arrangements therefore need to be looked at individually rather than assumed.

Two complications are worth planning for. The first is size. Because headcount is counted per employer, a group of 400 people can consist of five entities that are each below the lowest reporting band, and a restructuring can move an entity across a boundary without anyone intending it. The second is that a comparison is not confined to the reporting entity. Where a single source sets the pay conditions for several entities, a comparison can reach across the corporate boundary at which the report stops. Splitting the reporting duty does not split the equal pay risk.

4. What is uniform, and what is not

The sequencing decision becomes obvious once two things are held apart. The analytical core of the Directive is written in the Directive and arrives in every transposition. The administrative shell is national, and it is the part that cannot be designed centrally.

5. What waiting for the German law actually costs

The argument for waiting is reasonable on its face. Germany has not published a draft, the expert commission's recommendations are not law, and building to a text that does not exist risks building the wrong thing.

It is the wrong argument for a group, for three reasons. First, the obligations that have already started elsewhere mostly depend on neither size nor reporting: pay information in recruitment, the ban on asking about pay history, the end of pay secrecy clauses. Those are policy and process changes, and they are the same changes in every country. Second, the part of the work that takes longest, which is establishing defensible value groups, is governed by the Directive's own criteria and does not change when the German text arrives. Third, a group that has already produced a compliant report in Italy has a tested method, and the German exercise becomes a second run rather than a first.

6. Practical implications

1. Build an entity map before a project plan. Legal entity, country, headcount on a stated date and by a stated counting method, and the national transposition status. This is the document the whole programme sequences from, and most groups do not have it.
2. Sort the duties into size-dependent and size-independent. Recruitment transparency, the pay history ban, pay secrecy, and the right to pay information apply regardless of headcount wherever national law is in force. They are the immediate items.
3. Set the programme start from the earliest binding national date, not from 7 June 2027. For a DACH group with an Italian, Greek, Polish, or Estonian entity, that date is already in the past.
4. Standardise the method, localise the output. One job evaluation framework, one pay definition, one metric set. Country-specific filing, formats, thresholds, and language.
5. Check each entity's distance to a threshold. Counting is per employer, and an entity close to a band boundary should be planned against the higher band.
6. Track transposition as a standing item, not a one-off scan. Greece and Estonia moved over the summer, and France, Romania, Finland, and the Czech Republic all have bills in parliament now. Anything you write down today about the Netherlands, Spain, or Germany has a short shelf life.
7. Document the method, in each country, as you go. Where an employer has not met its transparency obligations, the burden of proof in a pay discrimination claim shifts to it. The documentation is the defence, and it is easier to write while the decisions are being made than to reconstruct afterwards.

The single-deadline view of this Directive was never accurate for a group that employs in more than one country, and it has now stopped being a useful approximation. The programme start is set by the earliest country, the method is set by the Directive, and the filing is set by twenty-seven national statutes arriving one at a time. Groups that sequence in that order will spend 2027 filing. The ones waiting for Berlin will spend it starting.