When is work of equal value? How to compare two roles (2026)

"Does Sandra in customer service do work of equal value to Rob in work planning?"

That is not a philosophical question. Once the pay transparency obligations apply, any employee may ask what colleagues doing equal work or work of equal value earn on average, broken down by gender. To answer that, you first have to know who belongs in the same category. And that is exactly the part most employers have no answer to.

This article explains how to answer that question for two specific roles: which factors you weigh, how a weighting becomes a verdict, and where the honest answer is that no verdict can be given.

Why your collective agreement does not settle this

A common reaction: "we are covered by a collective agreement, so this is handled." Half true, and the misunderstanding costs you time later.

A collective agreement fixes grades and a pay structure. That can satisfy the requirement of having a pay structure for equal work and work of equal value, and you do not have to rebuild that part. But alongside it sits a second, separate obligation: establishing categories of workers performing equal work or work of equal value. That one stays with the employer.

A pay grade is not a category. Two roles with completely different titles can be of equal value, and two people in the same grade do not automatically belong together. Within a single category, different collective agreements may even apply.

That is also where the risk sits. If you have not met a pay transparency obligation, then in a complaint it falls to you to show there was no discrimination. With a recorded weighting per role you stand on the other side of that same rule.

The four factors, and the fourteen points beneath them

Directive (EU) 2023/970 names four factors for determining equal value: skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions. That sounds manageable until you put two job descriptions side by side and notice that "effort" without further definition can mean anything.

So each factor breaks down into concrete points:

• Skills: level of knowledge, experience, complexity of problems, social and communication skills
• Effort: mental effort, emotional effort, physical effort
• Responsibility: for results and decisions, for people, for resources or information, for external relationships
• Working conditions: physical conditions, psychosocial conditions, irregularity and availability

Fourteen points, each scored from 1 to 5. Per factor that adds up to a maximum of 25, so a role ends up with a total between 0 and 100.

The four factors carry equal weight. The law prescribes no weighting, and equal weighting is the most neutral choice in the absence of a rule. Deviate from it and you need to be able to motivate that choice.

Look at what sits inside "effort" and "responsibility"

Emotional effort, social skills and responsibility for people are not friendly extras. They are precisely the points that traditional job evaluation systems structurally undervalue in roles where women are overrepresented, and the Dutch explanatory memorandum names that explicitly.

A system that scores knowledge and budget responsibility but not emotional load produces a tidy ladder in which care and customer roles sit permanently at the bottom. That is not a flaw in the execution. It is the direct result of what you do and do not measure.

From weighting to verdict: the arithmetic

Weighing two roles is step one. Attaching a verdict to it is step two, and that should be arithmetic you can retell, not a hunch.

The rules we apply:

• A difference of 5 points or less (on the scale of 100): candidate for work of equal value.
• A difference of 12 points or more: not work of equal value.
• In between: borderline case.
• If a single factor differs by more than 8 points, the verdict is never "equal value", however close the totals are.

That last rule does most of the work, and an example explains it best.

Two roles with the same total and a different profile

Take a customer service team leader and a senior work planner.

Factor	Customer service team leader	Senior work planner
Skills	15.6	20.3
Effort	18.8	10.4
Responsibility	17.2	20.3
Working conditions	12.5	12.5
Total	64.1	63.5

The difference is 0.6 points. On the totals alone this would be a clear "equal value".

But look at effort: 18.8 against 10.4, a gap of 8.4. The team leader scores high on emotional load and constant availability, the planner on mental concentration without that emotional component. The planner makes up the difference again on knowledge and responsibility for resources.

Same total, entirely different profile. Calling that "equal value" without comment is exactly the conclusion a works council or an equal treatment body will pick apart. So the outcome here is a borderline case, with the question of where it belongs left where it should be: with you.

A borderline case is an answer, not a dodge

Plenty of tools are built to always return a verdict, because a verdict feels like the thing you paid for. But when roles sit close together while being built completely differently, "this is borderline and here is why" is simply the correct outcome. You get to see which factor drives the gap, and that is precisely the conversation to have with your works council.

And sometimes we refuse to judge

A weighting can only rest on what is written down. If a job description says nothing about the conditions the work happens in, that is not evidence the conditions are light. It means it is not there.

If more than three of the fourteen points go ungrounded in either text, no verdict follows. It would rest on assumptions, and assumptions are exactly what you cannot hand over in a complaint. Below that threshold, the borderline band widens the less the text says. Less information should lead to more caution, not to the same confidence.

Try it on two of your own roles

We have opened this weighting up as a free trial. You paste two job descriptions, they are weighed independently on the fourteen points, and you get the verdict with the scores per factor and the grounding per point.

What to know before you start:

• No account. You get a link to your outcome.
• One comparison per day per visitor. Enough to see what the method does.
• Paste full descriptions, not job titles. Tasks, responsibilities, requirements and working conditions. Under 200 characters there is nothing to weigh.
• The texts are wiped once the verdict is in. The outcome stays reachable through your link for seven days.

Free: do these two roles weigh the same?

Paste two job descriptions and see how they score on the four factors from the EU directive, with the sentence from your own text each score rests on.

Run the equal value trial →

Two roles is not yet a classification

An honest caveat belongs here. Comparing two roles shows you the method, but it is not yet an answer to the question the law asks.

That question is about categories: which groups of roles inside your organisation perform work of equal value? For that you need every role on one consistent ladder, because a series of separate comparisons can contradict itself. A is equal to B, B is equal to C, and then A turns out not to be equal to C. There is no way to explain an outcome like that.

That is what a job structure does: the same weighting, applied across all your roles at once, with the bands and the rationale that follow from it. What that looks like is worked out in the job structure example of an installation company with five roles.

The trial is the first building block, not the destination. But it is the cheapest way to see whether the method holds up on roles you know well.

The core

Equal value is not decided on job title, not on pay grade and not on gut feeling, but on four factors broken down into fourteen concrete points. The outcome should be arithmetic you can retell, including the rule that two roles with the same total but a different profile do not produce equal value without a conversation.

And the classification itself stays yours. A weighting delivers the evidence you base it on. Establishing it is the employer's job, with your works council in the room.