EU Pay Transparency Directive: the 2026 ATS checklist

7 June 2026. That was the transposition deadline for EU Directive 2023/970 on pay transparency. France missed it. The bill was presented to the Council of Ministers on 10 September 2026, still has to go through Parliament, and the government targets entry into force on 1 January 2028. Settled: the directive. In progress: the French law and its timeline.

Meanwhile, we looked at offers published last week on three French job boards. One in two still displays "compensation according to profile". That is not yet illegal in France. It will be once the law applies.

Why the directive changes the game for ATS vendors

Directive 2023/970 does not target the ATS in the technical sense. It targets gender pay equality. But the only place where the transparency promise becomes operational is in the recruitment process. And the recruitment process runs through the ATS.

It is exactly like the arrival of GDPR in 2018. The law did not talk about software, it talked about people's rights. And yet every ATS had to redesign its fields, its consents, its retention periods. The transparency directive is producing the same shock, on a different scope.

The trap is to think this is a legal issue that will be settled with a memo from HR. No. It is a tool issue. If your ATS cannot do certain precise things, you will end up patching on the day the law applies. And patching compliance is expensive.

The 4 obligations that directly impact recruitment

We leave aside pay gap reporting, which concerns HRIS and payroll. We focus on what goes through the recruiter. They come from the directive and the French bill, and will only bind employers after the vote.

Obligation 1: salary range in every job posting. No more "according to profile", no more "according to experience". The range will have to appear in the posting, or be communicated to the candidate before the interview if the position was not advertised. And it will have to be realistic: a 25k-90k range for a manager role is likely to be read as a circumvention.

Obligation 2: ban on salary history. You will no longer be able to ask candidates their current salary or past compensation. Not in the application form, not in the interview, not in a pre-qualification questionnaire. This practice, still widespread in France, will become a direct legal risk.

Obligation 3: right to access information. Any employee will be able to request their own pay and average compensation levels by gender for their job category. The French bill sets a response time of two months at most, and the data will have to be traceable.

Obligation 4: justifying gaps above 5%. In the directive, for companies with at least 100 employees, any gender pay gap of at least 5% not explained by objective criteria triggers a joint evaluation with employee representatives. The French bill leaves the threshold to a decree, which cannot set it above 5%.

The first two cover all employers, and no recruitment threshold has been announced in the French bill so far. The rest would go further than the directive: pay gap indicators from 50 employees, instead of 100.

The checklist: 8 points to audit in your ATS

Here are the questions to ask your ATS vendor, or yourself if you still rely on Excel and Outlook folders.

1. Structured salary range field at the job description level

Not in the free-text body of the posting. In a dedicated field: min, max, currency, period, variable presence. Why structured? Because tomorrow, you will need to extract that data for an audit, for internal reporting, to answer an employee's question. If it is in prose, it is unusable.

2. Automatic inheritance job description to published posting

You write the range once on the job description. It propagates automatically to the career site, to job boards, to LinkedIn shares. If the range is entered manually for each publication, you will have inconsistencies between channels. And inconsistencies are auditable.

3. Blocking publication without a range

A job posting without a range cannot go live. The system refuses, period. It is exactly like a missing GDPR consent: you do not publish. The block must be configurable by country (for companies recruiting outside the EU) and by contract type.

4. Removing the "current salary" field from candidate forms

Many ATS still ship this field by default, sometimes marked as mandatory. To clean up. While you are at it, check the LinkedIn import forms and pre-qualification questionnaires: the practice sometimes hides three clicks deeper.

5. Library of objective fixation criteria

For each range, you must be able to document the reasoning: experience level, key skills, responsibilities, geography. The goal is not to please the lawyer. The goal is to be able to defend the range if a candidate or employee challenges it. Without documentation, you are exposed.

6. Integrated gender reporting

Simple extraction of received candidates, hired candidates, breakdown by gender, by level, by starting compensation. If you have to export to Excel and cross-reference manually, your ATS does not follow. Gender reporting becomes a continuous steering tool, not an annual deliverable.

7. Decision logging

Who validated which range, based on what criteria, on what date. This is auditability, not surveillance. In case of a dispute, the company must prove the decision is documented and grounded. If the ATS logs nothing, the recruiter's memory becomes the evidence.

8. Clean integration with HRIS

The ATS produces hiring data. The HRIS produces career data. Pay gap reporting crosses both. If the ATS export does not align with the HRIS nomenclature (job codes, levels, collective agreements), reporting becomes a nightmare. To check now, not on the eve of entry into force.

A concrete case: what happens in an 80-employee SMB

Take an 80-employee SMB, a chartered accounting firm, hiring six profiles per year. Under the directive, they escape pay gap reporting, which starts at 100 employees. Under the French bill, which lowers the indicator threshold to 50, they would have indicators to report.

They would also be subject to the recruitment obligations. And their ATS, chosen in 2019, does not offer a structured range field, accepts free entry in the description, and keeps a "current salary" field in the candidate form from day one.

Before the law enters into force, they will have to: audit their 12 active job descriptions, rebuild each with a defendable range, remove the current salary field, and train their three recruiters to stop asking the question. If the ATS does not follow, they will stick post-its on the internal dashboard. That lasts two months.

That is exactly the scenario we want to avoid. Not out of perfectionism. Because a labor inspection or a tribunal case in 2028 costs much more than six hours of configuration today.

What the directive does not solve

Let's be honest. The directive will not solve pay inequality in six months. It exposes gaps, forces documentation, holds employers accountable. But it says nothing about the value of work, the weighting of criteria, individual negotiations. An SMB can be perfectly compliant and still keep structural biases.

And it can backfire on companies that rush. Displaying a 35k-45k range on a posting, then hiring at 48k to secure a rare candidate, is a litigation topic. Transparency without coherence is worse than opacity.

Hence the importance of not doing compliance by the meter. The directive is an opportunity to overhaul the salary grid, fixation criteria, negotiation margins. It is an HR project, not a tickbox.

The exercise to do this week

Pull the last ten postings published by your team. Check:

• How many display a range?
• How many display a precise range (spread below 30%)?
• How many are backed by an internal document justifying the range?
• How many of the associated forms still ask for current salary?

If the score is below 80% on each line, you know where your next worksites are.

Soft CTA

At JobAffinity, we started integrating these points in the product roadmap as early as 2025. Structured compensation field at the job description level, blocking publication without a range, removing the current salary field by default, logging fixation decisions. If you want to see how it holds up on a 15-minute demo, the team is available.

The subject is not the logo of your ATS. The subject is that on the day the law applies (1 January 2028 targeted, subject to the vote), your process holds legally, without patches. What you can already do in your ATS: structure the range, remove the current salary field, log the criteria. Better to take the lead.