An employee asks what colleagues earn: what do you have to tell them?

Plenty has been written about putting a salary range in the job ad. Almost nothing about another duty in the EU Pay Transparency Directive, even though it can land on your desk on any ordinary Tuesday: an employee who asks what colleagues doing equal or equivalent work earn on average, broken down by gender. Once the rules apply, you have a statutory deadline to answer.

This is the right to information under Directive (EU) 2023/970, implemented in the Netherlands through the pay transparency bill (file 36949, intended start 1 January 2027). This article explains what it covers, the trap most employers do not see coming, and how to answer a request without turning it into an afternoon of digging.

What an employee may actually request

The core is simple: an employee has the right to the gender-split average pay levels for the category of workers doing equal or equivalent work to them. On top of that, they are entitled to the objective criteria on which their pay and pay progression are based.

Note what is and is not asked. It is an average per category, not the salary of one identifiable colleague. The employee gets to know that men in their category earn X on average and women earn Y, so they can judge whether there is an unexplained gap. They do not get a list of names and amounts.

Important: this right applies to every employer, regardless of size. The pay-gap reporting duty only starts at 100 employees, but the individual right to information applies to a company with eight people too.

Two deadlines you have to meet

The right to information has two sides, and employers usually forget the second.

• Reactive. When a request comes in, you provide the information within a reasonable term, at most two months after the date of the request.
• Active. On top of that, you must inform employees once a year, on your own initiative, that this right exists and how to use it. You do not sit back and wait for someone to knock; you actively remind your people once a year.

That active duty is easy to overlook, while a single internal notice per year ticks it off.

The trap: the small category

This is where it goes wrong in practice. Say the category the requester falls into has only two people. Or exactly one woman. Then the average stops being an anonymous number: the requester can back out the pay of a recognisable colleague. With two people, they subtract their own salary and are left with the other person's. With a subgroup of one, that single salary is the average.

The reflex of many employers is: I cannot share this, or I will only give a combined total without the split. That is wrong. The directive gave member states the option to restrict such re-identifiable data to worker representatives or the labour inspectorate. The Netherlands did not adopt that exception. So you still have to provide the information, even when the category is small.

What you do add is the legal basis and the purpose. The information can become personal data under the GDPR; the basis for that processing is your legal obligation (Article 6(1)(c) GDPR). That comes with a purpose limitation: the employee may use the data solely to assess equal pay for equal or equivalent work. So you do not refuse, you disclose with a clear note.

Want a substantiated answer in minutes? Inside the job architecture, the tool derives the category and adds the legal basis for you. See the job architecture →

What you must be able to show behind the average

Naming an average is not enough. The employee is also entitled to the objective criteria, and you must be able to explain why certain roles sit in the same category. Article 4(4) of the directive requires categories to be formed in a non-arbitrary way, on objective, gender-neutral criteria. In practice those are the four familiar factors:

1. Skills and knowledge
2. Effort
3. Responsibility
4. Working conditions

Without a job-evaluation system you have no categories of equivalent work, and without categories you cannot even calculate the average, let alone justify it. The right to information stands or falls with the substantiation underneath it.

And keep your answer. Every request you handle is the dated proof that you responded within the term. If the employee, the works council, or a regulator asks, you want to be able to show when you provided what.

How you handle this in aycabtu

The job architecture on employers.aycabtu.com has a dedicated tab for this, Information requests. The flow is deliberately short:

1. You pick the role of the employee who made the request. The tool derives the category of equivalent work from the weighting already in your job architecture.
2. You fill in the one thing the tool does not know: the two average figures, one for the men and one for the women in that category.
3. You get back a formal PDF letter with the gender-split average, the objective criteria behind the grouping, the legal basis, and, where relevant, an automatic re-identifiability note with the GDPR basis attached.

Every answer lands in a dated log as an evidence trail, and a ready-to-use text is prepared for the annual active-information duty that you can circulate internally. The tool deliberately stores no individual salaries or names, only the two averages and the headcounts, which keeps you on the safe side of the privacy rules.

The right to information is included with a job architecture; there is no separate charge. Want to see what one looks like first? Have a look at the example job architecture.

The takeaway

The right to information is the least discussed part of the pay transparency rules and, at the same time, the part that can catch you off guard on an ordinary working day. You have to answer within two months, you have to remind your employees of it once a year, and you have to disclose the small, re-identifiable category too. That only works if the substantiation underneath is right: a job evaluation on objective, gender-neutral criteria, with categories you can explain.

Set that up once and you turn such a request from a moment of panic into a two-minute fill-in job.

Build your job architecture and answer information requests without the hassle →