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Topic · recruitment · Article 5In force (EU law)
Recruitment: pay range and the ban on asking about pay history (Article 5)
Job applicants have the right to be told the starting pay or pay range before the interview, and the employer may not ask about their pay history. The obligations in Article 5 apply broadly - regardless of how many employees you have.
Reviewed June 2026 · basis: Directive (EU) 2023/970 - full text, Danish version (EUR-Lex)
The recruitment rules are where pay transparency begins - before there is even an employment relationship. Two obligations in Article 5 change how a hiring process is allowed to look: the applicant must know the pay early, and you may not ask what the person earned before.
Pay range before the interview
A job applicant has the right to be told the starting pay or pay range for the position - based on objective, gender-neutral criteria - and this must happen before the interview. The information can be given in the vacancy notice itself or in another way ahead of the interview (Article 5). The point is that the applicant must know the pay range before the negotiation begins, so that pay does not become a result of how low the individual dares to start.
The ban on asking about pay history
The employer may not ask job applicants about their pay history - neither about their current pay nor about what they earned in previous jobs (Article 5(2)). The ban is connected to the first: if a new pay is built on what the applicant earned before, a historical gender pay gap risks being carried over into the new employment. The rule breaks that chain.
It applies regardless of how many you are
Unlike the reporting obligation (see Pay reporting), the recruitment rules do not depend on the number of employees. They are a standing practice in every hiring process - including for the small employer who never reaches a reporting threshold. This is worth establishing, because the size bands easily come to overshadow the obligations that apply broadly.
The range must rest on gender-neutral criteria
Stating a pay range is not enough in itself - the range must be based on objective, gender-neutral criteria. That ties recruitment together with the way work is compared and paid more broadly: the same skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions that determine what counts as work of equal value. See Work of equal value.
In the Danish draft
The Danish draft bill gathers the recruitment rules in proposed § 1 c: the applicant’s right to information about starting pay or pay range and the ban on asking about pay history. It is a draft, not applicable law - see Danish implementation.
Read also
Other pages on the Pay Transparency Directive in the same theme.
In force (EU law)
Pay reporting: bands and deadlines
Who must report the gender pay gap, when, and what the report covers - the four size bands and the seven data points in Article 9. The deadlines are fixed calendar dates in the directive, not a number of years after the Danish transposition.
In force (EU law)
Joint pay assessment: the 5% trigger
When an employer must carry out a joint pay assessment together with workers' representatives: the three conditions in Article 10 - an unexplained average gender pay gap of at least 5% in a category of workers, not remedied within six months.
In force (EU law)
Right to pay information
The worker's right to obtain, in writing, their own pay level and the average pay levels broken down by sex for the same work - and the employer's duty to reply within two months. Plus the annual duty to inform and the ban on preventing anyone from speaking about their own pay.
In force (EU law)
Work of equal value
Equal pay applies to the same work and to work of equal value. What makes two jobs comparable is decided by four gender-neutral factors - skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions - not by the job title and not by the DISCO code. This is the concept on which every threshold and the 5 % trigger depends.
In force (EU law)
Burden of proof
The Directive shifts the burden of proof. Tell apart the three rules in Article 18 - the prima facie shift, the shift where transparency is lacking, and the exclusion for criminal proceedings - and see why maintained, gender-neutral documentation is what you actually need to be able to produce.
Draft - not adopted
The Danish transposition (draft)
The Danish bill that is to transpose the Pay Transparency Directive into the Equal Pay Act: status in the consultation, the proposed thresholds (100+, conditional 50–99), the cadence (first report 2028/2031), the role of Statistics Denmark, the new authority and enforcement through compensation - all of it draft, not adopted.
In force (EU law)
Penalties and compensation
What happens when the equal pay rules are not complied with: access to justice, who may bring the claim, the right to full compensation with no cap, periodic penalty payments, the penalties floor in Article 23 (with no amount set in the directive) and exclusion from public contracts. Plus the Danish line: compensation, not new fines.
Primary sources
We cite primary sources and date-stamp them. Only the Danish version of an EU instrument has legal force.
- Directive (EU) 2023/970 - full text, Danish version (EUR-Lex) · CELEX 32023L0970 - only the Danish version is legally authoritative
- Directive (EU) 2023/970 - official reference (ELI)
- Bill amending the Equal Pay Act - draft in public consultation (Høringsportalen 71101) - draft - not enacted
Corrections and changes
Rules and sources move. We update the page when they do and note each change with a date - so you can see what changed, and when.
- Page created. Basis: Article 5 of the Pay Transparency Directive (EU) 2023/970 (applicable EU law), including the ban on asking about pay history in Article 5(2), and the Danish draft bill in consultation 71101, proposed § 1 c (draft, not enacted).
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