October 8, 2026
Get an overview of the danish draft that was submitted for parliamentary hearing.
Category:
Pay Equity LegislationAuthor:
Alexander Gram
/
CEO & Co-Founder
On 8 October 2026, the Danish Minister for Employment presented the draft law L 68 to the Folketing/parliament. It implements the EU Pay Transparency Directive (Directive (EU) 2023/970) by amending the Danish Equal Pay Act (ligelønsloven).
This is a long read, with 63 pages of lawyer-language. Therefore, we will try to summarize the key points during this article that will be important as you prepare for the pay transparency directive.
The approach is recognisably Danish. It keeps pay-setting with the social partners, builds on the payroll reporting employers already do, and leaves employers with some methodological freedom. However, this does not make it a walk-in-the-park.
The draft introduces:
As always, the draft is not final until it is adopted. The next step is that it will have its first hearing in the parliament on the 22nd of October. However, as we already see and know from other countries, there’s a clear direction. Your first reporting deadline is not your implementation deadline - there are significant obligations already from 1st of March 2027.
The general entry-into-force date is 1 March 2027. That is nearly nine months after the Directive's transposition deadline of 7 June 2026. The draft acknowledges the delay and explains that it gives businesses time to adapt.
From that date, recruitment transparency, accessible pay criteria and employees' information rights apply. An employer whose first report is due in 2031 will still need to explain its pay criteria and answer an employee's information request in 2027.
Reporting is phased in separately (§ 5 c):
The transition is easy to misread. The existing rules on gender-segregated pay statistics still apply to 2026 payroll data, reported in 2027 (§ 4(2)). The new regime starts with 2027 payroll data. For the first reporting group, payroll data must therefore be right from 1 January 2027, two months before the act enters into force. This is quite important, as it means pay set before the act enters into force, including any gaps you carry into January 2027, will show up in your first statutory report.
There are also several operational deadlines inside the draft:
The amended § 1 requires every employer to use pay structures that ensure equal pay. Those structures must make it possible to assess whether employees perform work of equal value.
The criteria must include responsibility, skills, effort, and working conditions, plus other relevant factors where appropriate. They must be objective and gender-neutral, and relevant soft skills must not be undervalued. The explanatory notes give examples of soft skills:
According to the notes, a pay structure shows how and for what employees are paid. That can include pay grades, bands or job groups, the criteria behind them, and progression criteria such as raises, bonuses and allowances. Internal pay guidelines or a pay policy can meet the requirement, and there is freedom of method.
This is more than giving every job a title or putting employees into pay bands. A technical specialist and an HR specialist are not incomparable just because they sit in different departments. Placing them in the same grade does not explain the evaluation either. The demands and responsibilities of the jobs need to support the decision of the grouping.
The draft does not require identical pay for everyone doing work of equal value. Differences can rest on objective, gender-neutral and impartial criteria such as performance and competence. Compensation teams should keep two questions apart:
Using an employee's current pay to value their job makes the exercise circular, and non-valid. Similarly, it is not a solution to split two employees with jobs of equal value due to performance differences.
Where shop stewards exist, the job-value criteria must be agreed with them. The employer sets the categories of employees, in cooperation with representatives where relevant. A suggestion based on our experience is to involve representatives before the methodology is settled, not shortly before the reporting deadline.
Under new § 1 c, applicants must receive:
Denmark keeps the method flexible. There is no requirement to publish a range in every job advertisement. The explanatory notes mention a published advertisement, before the interview, or otherwise before an employment contract is signed. The employer decides how, but do make sure the applicant receives it and that it is documented.
Employers may not ask applicants about their pay history in current or previous jobs. The notes extend this to actively trying to obtain that information. Employers may ask about pay expectations, but only after sharing the range and the collective-agreement information. Applicants can always volunteer their expectations.
The notes also accept that negotiation can end outside the range. That makes it important to document the objective basis for any exception - another reason to get much more structured on pay-decisions for new hires.
New § 1 d requires every employer to give employees easy access to the objective, gender-neutral criteria used to set pay, pay levels and pay progression. There is no small-employer exemption. A personnel policy, or a reference to the criteria in the collective agreement, can be enough.
A useful test is whether an employee can see what drives their starting pay, what leads to a raise and how progression is decided. A policy saying pay depends on "the market, performance and management discretion" describes a philosophy, not the criteria actually applied.
Under new § 1 e, employees can request:
They can ask directly, through their shop steward or union, or through the new Institute.
Pay level means gross annual pay and the corresponding gross hourly pay (§ 1 a(4)). It is not a monthly base figure, a market benchmark or a department median. This is where categorisation becomes very important: an employer cannot answer reliably without knowing who belongs in the comparison category.
Employees must receive the answer in writing within two months. If the answer is inaccurate or incomplete, they can ask for clarification and must receive a written, reasoned reply within four weeks. That clarification step is not a new request for more data, and not a second two-month window.
Employers must inform employees once a year of the right and how to use it. A yearly reminder pointing to an intranet page meets the requirement. An intranet page on its own does not.
Where a category contains only one sex, the comparison may not be possible. The employer must explain why.
New § 2 a(3) adds an important safeguard. Where an answer, a pay report or a joint pay assessment directly or indirectly reveals an identifiable colleague's pay, it goes only to the shop steward or the Institute. They advise the employee on a possible claim without disclosing actual pay.
The explanatory notes admit that, unlike today's statistics, anonymity can no longer be guaranteed. The Institute receives all report and joint pay assessment data without restriction.
Consider a category with one woman and one man. A pay level by sex immediately reveals the other person's pay. The current draft requires that the information is sent through an intermediary. It does not give employers a general right to refuse requests from small groups.
The 8-of-each-sex reporting condition for employers with 50–99 employees is not a privacy rule for small groups under employee’s right to information. It is the employer’s responsibility to ensure that reports provided to the employees does not result in disclosure of personal identifiable pay.
Employers may require that comparison information obtained under § 1 e is used only to exercise the employee's own equal pay rights (§ 2 a(2)). That restriction never covers the employee's own pay, which they remain free to share with anyone.
The draft recognises intersectional discrimination. It also states that this creates no obligation to collect data on protected characteristics other than sex (§ 1 a(14)–(15)).
Employers covered by full reporting will report seven indicators:
Statistics Denmark will send a report free of charge when the employer's payroll reporting shows at least 100 employees (§ 5 b). Employers in DA's member organisations report to DA and receive the report from DA. Employers will report the same payroll data as today:
The pay concept is broad. It covers pay in cash and in kind, including complementary and variable elements, and the explanatory notes list occupational pension among them. A review limited to basic pay and annual bonuses will not be sufficient.
We always recommend to start with an inventory of every pay component, and test how joiners, leavers, part-time employees and leave are handled. This is still not made clear under the current draft.
There is one gap to watch. The draft lets Statistics Denmark keep "the same method and standard calculation" it uses today. Today's company statistics use standardised hourly earnings (Statistics Denmark, FORTJ_STAND):
The new report also needs annual pay levels, medians, variable-pay indicators and quartiles. It is still unclear how these numbers will be calculated.
Statistics Denmark's report covers only employees paid for time worked. Employees paid per delivered unit or per kilometre, such as couriers or taxi drivers, do not disappear from reporting. The employer must report on them itself.
This is the most important detail under the Danish draft, as it provides an easy route for companies letting DST do the statistics/reporting, but it does not remove the responsibility of these groupings being valid under the definition of “work of equal value”.
The legal duty to report category-level gaps sits with the employer (§ 5 a). It must be based on the employer's own categories of employees doing the same work or work of equal value. Statistics Denmark's report groups employees by DISCO code and job status: ordinary employees, managers, and apprentices or under-18s.
Where that grouping does not reflect the employer's categories, the employer must produce its own category report (§ 5 d(1)(4)). The explanatory notes are quite direct. DISCO codes compare people in the same occupation, while work of equal value reaches across occupations. DISCO-based grouping will therefore "often not be sufficient", and "in many cases" employers will need to supplement Statistics Denmark's report with their own (explanatory notes, p. 43).
Receiving a report from Statistics Denmark is not the same as completing the equal-value analysis. Map the DISCO codes against your internal job architecture, then test whether the resulting categories hold up. Neither classification should override the other without analysis.
A report that is not submitted also remains the employer's problem. Under § 5 d, the employer prepares its own report in these cases:
Make sure that you internally have assigned a person who is responsible for someone to check that the report is submitted, covers the required population and uses appropriate categories.
First of all, it is important to mention that these obligations apply to any employer. That means both private and public employers as well.
Reporting is done per legal entity (CVR number). Groups do not receive a consolidated report. The explanatory notes use A.P. Møller-Mærsk and Coop as examples.
A reporting boundary is not necessarily the boundary of an equal pay claim, though. The Directive allows comparisons beyond one employer where a single source sets the pay conditions (Directive Art. 19).
Employers in agriculture, hunting, forestry and fishing are newly covered when they have at least 100 employees. They were previously exempt because they do not report pay data to Statistics Denmark.
Employers with 50–99 employees report if they have at least 8 employees of each sex in the same employee group, determined by DISCO code. The sector exemptions above still apply in this size band. These employers report six indicators: everything except the category-level breakdown. They fall outside the corrective-measure and joint pay assessment duties, which start at 100 employees.
The current approach is replaced. It covered employers with 35 or more employees and at least 10 of each sex in the same job function. It also allowed an agreed equal pay statement instead of statistics. Both disappear.
Before delivering the category-level report, the employer must consult the shop stewards and make sure the underlying data is correct and the methods suitable (§ 5 e(2)).
The employer then delivers the report to the Institute within one month of receiving it or completing its own (§ 5 e(1)). A report received on 1 September 2028 must therefore reach the Institute by 1 October 2028.
The Institute publishes the six organisation-level indicators within one month, in a form that allows comparison between employers across sectors and regions (§ 7(4)). The category-level breakdown is not published. It goes to employees, shop stewards and the Institute.
Employees, shop stewards and the Institute can request clarification of any figure, and the employer must give a reasoned reply within two months. Category reports from the previous four years must be handed over on request, if the employer has them. That is not an instruction to reconstruct reports that never existed.
Prepare the employee explanation alongside the numbers, not after publication. It should help highlight what the figures show, what has been investigated and what action is underway.
The draft is built on an implementation agreement between FH (the Danish Trade Union Confederation) and DA. The social partners in both the public and private sectors back it, and the Ministry of Employment's Implementation Committee recommended it. The government proposes to follow that recommendation (L 68, explanatory notes, p. 7).
The parties describe the result as a minimum implementation. It preserves employers' methodological freedom and lets them keep using established payroll reporting and data.
That label needs some qualification. Denmark adds reporting for some employers with 50–99 employees. It also does not use the Directive's option to exempt employers with fewer than 50 workers from making pay-progression criteria accessible (Directive Art. 6(2)).
The Danish model is also written into the explanatory notes:
The Danish model will shape how compliance is organised. However, it does not remove the need to show that pay decisions and job comparisons are objective and gender-neutral.
The amended § 1(5) switches off specific parts of the legal provisions where a collective agreement provides corresponding rights and duties. The provisions it lists are:
The deadlines in § 5 c, delivery of the report to the new Institute (§ 5 e(1)) and the right to know your DISCO code (§ 5 g) are not on the list.
Having a collective agreement is therefore not enough. The agreement must contain at least the same obligations. Disputes then go to the labour-law system (det fagretlige system) rather than the ordinary courts.
According to the explanatory notes, three areas already handle gender pay statistics through their collective agreements:
For HR, the useful exercise is an obligation-by-obligation mapping. Which requirements does the applicable agreement cover? Which remain statutory? Who handles requests, consultation, disputes and reporting? Make sure that you document that mapping rather than relying on a general statement that "our collective agreement takes care of it".
The draft establishes Arbejdsmarkedets Institut for Ligeløn (the Labour Market Institute for Equal Pay) as both the national equality body and the monitoring body for equal pay (new § 7). It takes over equal pay from the Danish Institute for Human Rights.
As equality body, the Institute will:
As monitoring body, it will:
It will also advise employees on which route to take: the labour-law system, the Equal Treatment Board (Ligebehandlingsnævnet) or the ordinary courts.
A cooperation agreement between the Ministry, DA and FH will set the Institute's governance, management and appointments. The state contributes DKK 1.6 million a year, and the social partners fund the rest (explanatory notes, p. 23).
The draft works in two steps (§ 5 f).
First, an employer with at least 100 employees that has been asked for clarification of its report must correct pay differences that cannot be justified by objective, gender-neutral criteria. It must do so within a reasonable time, which the notes set at two months as a starting point, in close cooperation with the shop stewards.
Second, a joint pay assessment is required where three conditions are met:
The assessment covers only the affected categories and is carried out with the shop stewards. It must include:
The method is free as long as these elements are covered.
Two misunderstandings are worth avoiding. The 5% trigger concerns a category of comparable work, not the company-wide gap or the gap of an individual to the average in the group. And a difference below 5% is not automatically compliant either.
The finished assessment goes to employees and shop stewards, and to the Institute on request. Either side can ask the Institute to take part in carrying out the measures.
Denmark enforces mainly through individual compensation (godtgørelse) and the burden of proof. Fines seems to be used as a backstop..
New § 3(5) gives a right to compensation where an employer:
The explanatory notes are clear that these are procedural breaches. Compensation does not require a finding of pay discrimination. The Equal Treatment Board cannot award compensation for purely procedural breaches, so those cases go to the labour-law system or the ordinary courts.
Fines apply to other breaches (§ 6 b):
There are currently no defined amounts for the fines.
The burden of proof also shifts. If an employer has not met its transparency obligations, it must prove that pay discrimination has not taken place (§ 6(3)). The exception is a breach that was clearly unintentional and minor, which the courts decide (§ 6(4)).
Not every late reply proves discrimination. But an apparently administrative failure can weaken the employer's position in a later case. This makes it important to ensure you have logs on request, annual notices, documented criteria and report sign-offs as evidence.
Protection against retaliation is extended: compensation now covers any adverse treatment, not just dismissal (§ 3(4)).
There is also a new limitation rule (§ 6 c). Notifying the employer of an equal pay claim, in any form, interrupts limitation for six months, and only once. A claim only counts as met when the employer both accepts and pays it.
As already mentioned, this is a draft from the Danish The Ministry of Employment and Gender Equality (Beskæftigelses- og Ligestillingsministeriet). It is not complete or final yet, but we expect it to be close to the final legislation. This means that the clarity is there for employers to start the preparations - as these things can take a while.
First, scope. Map your Danish legal entities, the collective agreements that apply to them, and which obligations each agreement covers. Establish governance with your shop stewards.
Second, data. Before 1 January 2027, complete an inventory of every pay component, including pension, allowances, benefits in kind and variable pay. Validate DISCO and job-status coding: employees have a right to know their code (§ 5 g). Make sure 2027 payroll data is complete from the first day.
Third, recruitment and requests. Before 1 March 2027, make decisions on pay range disclosure, controls against pay-history questions, accessible pay criteria, the annual notice and a request process with two-month and four-week deadlines into operation.
Fourth, job architecture. As soon as possible, build and agree categories of work of equal value with your shop stewards. Run trial analyses, investigate differences and document your pay-decision criteria. Remember, these groups are necessary for you to provide employees with their reports, and must therefore be in place prior to sending the first employee-facing report.
Fifth, reporting and remediation. Before your first report, plan how you will reconcile Statistics Denmark's DISCO-based report with your own categories. Prepare consultation, delivery to the Institute and employee communication, and assign ownership of corrective measures.
The draft for L 68 tries not to mess with the Danish model: social partners, existing payroll reporting and methodological freedom. However, while doing so it still makes the reasons behind pay decisions much more visible, and gives employees and unions some very tangible tools for determining if they can pursue equal pay claims.
The most important Danish detail is easy to miss. Statistics Denmark will hand most employers a ready-made report, but the draft itself expects that report to fall short in many cases. The responsibility of the grouping and accuracy stays with the employer!
Therefore, as an employer you cannot simply think about whether you can calculate the report. The real question is whether you can: explain why this employee is paid this amount, which work we treat as comparable, and what objectively explains any difference?
