Ready for pay transparency, with a classification you can explain
Pay transparency rules will require every employer, including those under a hundred staff, to explain why one role pays more than another. Large companies have a compensation team for that. You do not.
Aycabtu builds the piece you need for it: a job architecture. Your roles ranked by weight, scored on the four statutory factors, with a pay band per grade and the reasoning for every placement. You start with your job profiles, that is all you need.
One free job structure of three roles per account. Want your remaining roles in it? Then you upgrade to the complete package (from €1,995 per year, including updates and a quarterly re-scan). No credit card to get started.
What you get for free
Your own roles, not somebody else's example. The same weighing on the four legal factors, the same salary ladder with a range per grade, and per role the reasoning for why it sits there.
Covered by a collective agreement, or running your own pay table? Import it and we place your roles into your own grades, leaving the amounts untouched. Add the grade a role holds today and you see straight away where your classification and our weighing diverge.
On screen you get all of it: the ladder, your roles, the weighing per factor, the categories of equivalent work that follow from it and per role the reasoning for why it sits there. The pay justification, the document you take to the works council or hand to an employee, comes with the package.
What your ladder looks like
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Service Engineer Scale 2
€33,000 – €43,000
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Work Planner Scale 3
€38,000 – €50,000
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Installation Team Lead Scale 4
€45,000 – €59,000
Example from an installation company: three roles, each in their own place on one ladder. Your structure runs on your own roles and your own sector.
- 1 Supply your job profiles: paste them or upload them as a PDF.
- 2 We weigh them on knowledge and skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions.
- 3 You see the ladder, the range per grade, and per role why it sits there.
This is the start of your real job structure: these 3 roles show how the weighing works, and you build on the same structure later with the rest of your roles.
How it works
In three steps you see, on your own roles, exactly what the package will do for your whole company.
Provide your job profiles
Paste the job ad or upload the profile. We automatically extract the level, the scope and the required skills.
Confirm the criteria
Check education, experience, responsibility and working conditions. These are the four factors the directive asks for.
Get your ladder with its rationale
One salary ladder with min, median and max per grade, plus the criteria each role sits on and a ready-to-use line for your job ad.
Want to know where you stand first?
Run the free vacancy check →Two roles that seem to come out the same?
Compare them for free →What the law asks of you
These obligations apply to employers of every size, even if you never have to report. Aycabtu provides the rationale for each. The responsibility to apply it stays with you.
A salary range in every job ad (directive, article 5)
From the date it takes effect, you may no longer publish a job ad without stating a salary range or starting pay.
How Aycabtu helps: you get a defensible band with steps, plus a ready-to-use salary line you paste straight into your job ad. Not an arbitrary number, but backed by market data and the legal criteria.
Objective, gender-neutral criteria you can demonstrate (directive article 4, bill article 8(1))
Your pay must rest on objective criteria, weighed on the four legal factors, and you must be able to show this when an employee or inspector asks.
How Aycabtu helps: each role is weighed on knowledge and skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions. The completed profile plus the downloadable pay rationale form the evidence. You stay responsible for keeping your actual pay within those bands.
Being able to explain how roles relate to each other (directive article 7, Dutch bill article 10b)
Employees may ask what the average pay is for colleagues doing equal or equivalent work. You must be able to explain why role X is paid differently from role Y.
How Aycabtu helps: the job structure ranks all your roles on one consistent ladder, so the relationships hold up and are explainable. Separate market ranges per role can contradict each other; a job structure prevents that. And when an employee asks for the average pay of comparable colleagues, Aycabtu generates that answer (average pay by sex per category) plus an evidence log, ready to send.
Covered by a collective agreement? Then points 1 and 2 are largely settled: the grades and the amounts were collectively negotiated. Point 3 stays with the employer in every case, because no collective scheme delivers the categories of equivalent work. And if you use a recognised system such as ORBA or Hay, standing tasks remain with you: describe, weigh and place every new job by the same method, update your job descriptions every two to three years, and avoid or repair differences in grading between jobs that were valued the same. That is not a one-off project but work with a frequency, and the first of those comes round most often.
What the law also asks of you
Five obligations that get less attention, but apply from day one.
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No more asking about pay history
You may no longer ask an applicant what they earned at a previous employer (directive, article 5(2)). This applies to every employer, regardless of size.
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Pay secrecy clauses are void
A clause forbidding employees to discuss their pay has no effect. Many existing employment contracts still contain one.
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Accessible criteria for pay and progression
The criteria you base pay and pay progression on must be accessible to your employees (directive, article 6). The pay rationale is the document you share for this.
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Actively inform employees every year
Every year you must actively tell employees they may request pay information (directive, article 7). That is a recurring task, not a one-off, and a reason to keep your job structure current.
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Works council agreement
In many member states, establishing or changing a job-evaluation and grading system requires the works council's agreement. That determines your lead time, so start well before the national date.
Aycabtu provides the rationale and documentation. Whether you actually comply also depends on how you apply your pay and meet your obligations. This is not legal advice.
Legislative status checked on 5 September 2026 against parliamentary paper 36 949, no. 3. National implementation of the directive is still under way in several member states, so the exact dates and first reporting deadlines can still shift. The article numbers above refer to Directive (EU) 2023/970; national implementing acts use their own numbering.
From your free job structure to your whole company
Start free with a real job structure of 3 roles. When you want to cover your whole company, we fill that same structure with the rest of your roles.
Start free
A job structure of 3 roles, free
Your own roles, really weighed and graded. No credit card needed.
- + One salary ladder with a range per grade
- + Every role weighed on the four gender-neutral criteria
- + Per role the rationale, plus the categories of equivalent work
EU transparency package
Complete€1,995 per year
Your whole job structure, kept current. Price scales with the number of roles, cancel yearly.
- + Unlimited role analyses and rebuilds within your package
- + All your roles in one consistent salary ladder
- + Ranges per grade, ready for every job ad
- + The downloadable pay rationale (PDF)
- + Re-scanned against the live market every quarter
- + Fill your categories automatically from your payroll export (AFAS and other systems): head counts by sex and average pay, all in your browser, nothing leaves your system
What your numbers rest on
A salary band is only defensible if you can show where it comes from. That is why we build every band from verifiable sources and the legal criteria, and name those sources per role.
Market data with the source attached
We search live for recognised sources such as official national wage statistics, WageIndicator and applicable collective agreements, and name them per role. Every figure traces back to a source you can look up yourself, which is exactly what an employee or inspector may ask you for.
The four legal factors
Each role is weighed on knowledge and skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions. This is the gender-neutral method the directive prescribes. Per role you see the weighting and the sources it rests on, so you can make the comparison with your current system yourself.
One piece of evidence
Everything comes together in the pay rationale: method, weighted scores per role, criteria per grade and the sources used. You hand this over when an employee or inspector asks for it.
More than 25 roles?
For larger organisations we put together a custom job structure. Leave your email and we'll get in touch with a proposal.
Why now, when you don't have to report yet
With fewer than a hundred employees you get no reporting obligation at all. Between a hundred and a hundred and fifty, your first report is still years away. That is exactly why now is the moment to start.
Above a hundred and fifty employees your first report is due 7 June 2028. That sounds like plenty of time, but you report on calendar year 2027. Your grading therefore has to be in place when that year starts, otherwise you are reporting on a year in which you did not yet have it. The room you have runs until the measurement year, not until the report. Whether those dates move now that the law will take effect later than 1 January 2027 is not yet known.
The job-evaluation system and the right to information do apply from the day the law takes effect. If an employee asks what colleagues in equivalent roles earn on average, you have two months to answer. Without a documented grading you cannot answer that with any rationale.
More importantly: pay differences you bring into view now can be corrected gradually within your normal increase budget, spread over two or three cycles, without raising your total wage bill. Anyone who only measures once the obligation lands has to correct in one go, against a deadline, with the numbers already on the table.
The differences already exist in your organisation. The law makes them visible. The period before that is the cheapest time to solve them.
Your pay data never leaves your own system
To see how your categories actually stand, you need pay figures. With us those stay with you.
Aggregation happens in your browser
You pick the payroll export from your HR system. Reading and calculating run locally on your own machine. The file is never uploaded, and we have no endpoint that could receive one.
Only group results are sent
What reaches our systems is the number of men and women per role, an average only from three people upwards, and a median only from five. No individual salaries, no minimum or maximum, no names. If an average combined with another group would still point to one person, that average is withheld too.
You can verify it yourself
Open your browser's network tab while the file is read and watch exactly what gets sent. You do not have to take our word for it.
For the account details of your HR users and the group results we enter into a data processing agreement with you.
Why this is coming
The EU Pay Transparency Directive (EU 2023/970) requires employers to put a salary range in every job ad and to base pay on objective, gender-neutral criteria. That duty applies to employers of every size. The transposition deadline for member states was 7 June 2026, and countries across the EU are now writing it into national law. Many employers already publish ranges.
Aycabtu turns your job profiles into exactly that rationale: bands with steps and the criteria behind them, which you can explain to employees and the works council.
Frequently asked questions about pay transparency
What the EU directive asks of you as an employer.
Does pay transparency also apply to small companies?
Yes. The core obligations apply to every employer, regardless of size. Article 5 requires you to state a salary range in every job ad and forbids asking about pay history. Article 4 requires you to base pay policy on objective, gender-neutral criteria, which means having a system for job evaluation and grading. Only the reporting obligation (publishing the pay gap) applies solely to companies with 100 or more employees.
When do I need to be ready?
The EU transposition deadline for member states was 7 June 2026. Many countries are still writing the directive into national law, so the exact national date varies. But the first job ad without a salary range comes sooner than that date. Many employers already publish ranges under pressure from candidates and competition for talent.
What are the four gender-neutral criteria the law asks for?
The directive (EU 2023/970) names four factors: knowledge and skills (education, experience, certifications), effort (complexity, problem-solving, mental and physical load), responsibility (management, budget, scope, impact of errors), and working conditions (shift work, travel, physical conditions). On an employee's request you must be able to show that your pay rests on these factors.
Do I need to build a job structure?
You must have a system for job evaluation and grading based on objective, gender-neutral criteria. That obligation falls on every employer, regardless of size. Free in form, not optional in existence: you may set it up yourself or let a collective agreement cover it, but you have to have one. A job structure is the practical answer: it ranks all your roles on the same four factors, so you can explain why two comparable roles fall in the same pay range. Separate market ranges per role are not enough if the relationship between them does not hold up.
What if my company is already covered by a collective agreement?
An applicable collective agreement is your strongest anchor for the pay structure. The scales are collectively negotiated and that part you do not have to build again. Alongside it sits a second, separate obligation: establishing the categories of workers doing equal or equivalent work. That one stays with you as the employer, collective agreement or not. A collective pay grade is not a category: two roles with different titles can be equivalent, workers in the same grade do not automatically belong together, and a single category can even span workers under different collective agreements. So use the collective agreement as the starting point and establish the categories on top of it, with a weighting per role you can show. Where the collective agreement already sets the job evaluation system, the works council has no right of consent over that system, but you do have to involve them in establishing the categories.
Build your first job structure, free
Three roles, really weighed and graded. No credit card, and no pay data to supply.
Build your job structure for free