EU Pay Transparency Directive: the 2026 ATS checklist

7 June 2026. That is the date when EU Directive 2023/970 on pay transparency enters into application. As we write these lines, France has still not voted its transposition, the bill has just been transmitted to the Council of State, and the parliamentary vote is announced for late 2026.

Meanwhile, we looked at offers published last week on three French job boards. One in two still displays "compensation according to profile". In ten months, that is illegal.

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 in June 2026. 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.

Obligation 1: salary range in every job posting. No more "according to profile", no more "according to experience". The range must be displayed in the posting, or communicated to the candidate before the first interview. And it must be realistic: a 25k-90k range for a manager role is considered a circumvention.

Obligation 2: ban on salary history. You can no longer 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, becomes a direct legal risk.

Obligation 3: right to access information. Any employee can request to know average compensation levels by gender for equivalent positions. The employer has a deadline to respond, and the data must be traceable.

Obligation 4: justifying gaps above 5%. For companies with more than 100 employees, any gender pay gap above 5% not explained by objective criteria triggers a joint evaluation with employee representatives, and a correction plan within six months.

The first three obligations apply to all companies regardless of size. The fourth concerns companies with more than 100 employees, with a reporting calendar staggered until 2031.

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 in March 2027.

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

Take an 80-employee SMB, a chartered accounting firm, hiring six profiles per year. They have no pay gap reporting obligation, they are below the 100-employee threshold.

But they remain subject to the three other 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.

In June 2026, 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 2027 costs much more than six hours of configuration in 2026.

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 in June 2026, your process holds legally, without patches, without technical debt deferred to later. The pay transparency directive forces the industry to grow up. Better to take the lead.