August 11, 2025
France has begun the work on transposing EU 2023/970 - get the overview.
Category:
Pay Equity Legislation
France is in the midst of transposing Directive 2023/970 into national law. As of mid-2025, the Ministry of Labour has been conducting a joint consultation with social partners (employers’ groups and unions) to prepare a draft transposition law. The consultation was launched in May 2025 and is scheduled to conclude by late July 2025. The French government’s goal is to finalize a draft law by September 2025 and present it to Parliament in the autumn session.
Approach: The planned legislation will cover both the private and public sectors in one combined bill. In fact, parallel consultations have been held for the public sector: on June 10, 2025, the DGAFP (public service HR directorate) met with public-sector unions to outline the directive’s transposition for civil services, with a tight schedule of further meetings before presenting the text to the Conseil Commun de la Fonction Publique in early fall.
Despite an official draft is still to be published, the Ministry has circulated an orientation document to stakeholders detailing the expected measures. In early April 2025, the Labour Minister Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet publicly confirmed the government’s intent to “finalize the text in September” and to begin parliamentary debates in autumn 2025. This confirms that pay transparency is a high-priority item on France’s legislative agenda.
Before the EU directive, France had already introduced a robust tool to combat gender pay disparity: the Index de l’égalité professionnelle F/H (Gender Equality Index). Since 2019, all companies with at least 50 employees are required to calculate and publish this index annually by March 1. The index is a score out of 100, built from 4 or 5 indicators depending on company size:
Each year, employers must publish their overall Index score and each indicator result on their website and communicate them to employees (via the CSE, the employee representation body) and labor authorities. A perfect score is 100; a score below 75 is considered inadequate. The policy is deliberately strict: if a company scores below 75 points, it must implement corrective measures and rattrapage (pay adjustment plans) and publish these measures internally and externally. Companies scoring below 85 must also set improvement targets for each indicator.
Enforcement: French labor authorities actively monitor compliance. By law, if a company fails to publish its Index or to take required corrective steps, it faces financial penalties of up to 1% of total payroll. The Labour Inspectorate has made enforcement of Index obligations a priority, and companies which have a score below 75, will have up to three years to make corrections before sanctions can hit.
Effectiveness: According to the Ministry of Labour, the Index has improved transparency and prompted progress. As of 2025, about 80% of eligible companies reported their Index, with an average score around 88/100. However, gaps remain (the average female employee still earns significantly less than her male counterpart), and most firms do not score a full 100. This is why the French government views the EU directive as an opportunity to reinforce and refine its existing system. Notably, the directive will introduce new metrics and obligations that go beyond the current Index’s scope.
One of the major changes under Directive 2023/970 is pay transparency in the hiring process. The directive’s Article 5 gives job applicants a right to know the proposed pay for a position before or at the latest during a job interview. Every candidate must be informed of the initial salary level or range for the role they are applying to, and of any relevant collective agreement provisions that determine pay for the job. This aims to ensure more informed and equitable salary negotiations from the start, and to prevent situations where new hires (often women) are unaware of the pay scale and thus potentially accept lower pay.
Currently, French law does not require employers to advertise salary ranges in job postings or to proactively disclose pay during recruitment. There is also no ban on employers asking candidates about their past or current salary, and such questions have been common in interviews. This will change under the new regulations. The French government has signaled that it will implement the directive’s hiring transparency provisions in full - and even go beyond the EU minimum. According to the Labour Minister, employers will be prohibited from publishing job offers without a salary range disclosed. In other words, France plans to make salary indication in job advertisements mandatory, rather than merely requiring disclosure upon request. This measure goes a step further than the directive (which allows providing the information by the interview stage).
Additionally, employers will be forbidden from asking applicants about their salary history. Article 5 of the EU directive explicitly bars employers from asking about a candidate’s previous salary. France will adopt this as a black-letter rule: it “will no longer be possible for an employer to ask [a candidate] about their prior pay” during the hiring process. This represents a significant shift in recruitment practices. HR departments should prepare to train recruiters and revise interview guidelines to comply with these new rules. In practical terms, job postings in France will need to include a clear salary range (or starting salary), and interviewers must refrain from any questions regarding a candidate’s past compensation. These changes are aimed at preventing the continuation of pay gaps (for example, women’s historically lower pay shouldn’t follow them to a new job) and ensuring candidates compete on equal footing.
Alignment/divergence: This is an area where France is largely aligning with the directive’s requirements but also leveraging the directive to introduce more stringent transparency. The EU directive gives applicants a right to information, but does not mandate the format (it could be provided in an interview or upon request). France appears set to require the information upfront in the job listing itself.
Another core pillar of the EU directive is empowering employees with information about pay levels to detect and challenge unjustified pay gaps. Under Directive 2023/970, any worker has the right to request information about their own pay level and the average pay levels of colleagues of the opposite sex in the same job or in work of equal value. Upon request, employers must provide this data, broken down by gender, for the category of employees performing work of equal value. The directive also forbids pay secrecy: employers cannot stop employees from sharing or discussing their pay if they wish, especially when asserting equal pay rights.
Currently in France, there is no individual statutory right for an employee to obtain pay comparisons. French law of course mandates equal pay for equal work (this principle has existed since 1972) and employees who suspect discrimination can raise the issue (often via the company’s union delegates or the CSE, or ultimately in court). But there is no formal mechanism by which an individual employee can ask HR, “Am I paid less than others in my position, and if so by how much?” and expect a formal answer. Information on pay gaps has been aggregated in the form of the Equality Index or through the obligatory annual gender equality negotiations in companies, but not at the level of individual comparison data.
The transposition of the directive will introduce this as a new right in French law. Employers will need to be prepared to respond to pay information requests from employees within a reasonable time. The information must include the worker’s own salary and the average (or median) salary for peers of the other sex in the same ‘category of worker’ group. Importantly, this will require companies to have transparent pay grids or evaluation criteria to define what is “equal value” work.
Furthermore, the directive requires that employers inform employees annually of their right to request this pay information. In practice, French employers might need to include a note in pay slips, company intranets, or policy handbooks reminding staff that they can request gender pay gap information for their role.
Alignment/divergence: This employee right to information will be new for France, representing an alignment with the EU standard. It fills a gap in the current system: while France’s Equality Index has improved overall transparency, it operates at the company level and doesn’t directly equip an individual employee with data about their specific situation. The forthcoming law will thus empower employees in a way French law hasn’t before. For HR departments, this means salary structures and compensation policies must be well-defined and justifiable. In preperation, companies should start reviewing their pay grading systems and documenting objective criteria for pay differences (experience, qualifications, performance, etc.), since any unexplained gaps are likely to prompt questions once employees know they can ask.
The EU directive introduces a requirement for regular gender pay gap reporting by medium and large employers. This goes hand in hand with France’s existing Index, but there are differences in which employers are covered and what must be reported.
Directive requirements: All employers with at least 100 employees will eventually need to report detailed pay gap data. The directive phases this in: companies with 150+ employees must begin reporting by 7 June 2027, and those with 100-149 employees by 7 June 2031. (Member States can choose to implement faster or cover smaller firms, but those are the latest deadlines in the directive.) The reporting is to be done yearly for employers with 250+ employees. Employers must publish figures including:
Current French practice: France’s Index already obliges companies with 50 or more employees to calculate pay gap indicators every year. In that sense, France’s threshold has been more ambitious than the EU which only applies for employers with 100 or more employees. However, the type of reporting differs. The Index condenses several factors into a single score and a handful of indicator scores, whereas the EU directive mandates reporting of specific statistical measures (e.g. percentage gaps and proportions) without combining them into an index. France will need to adapt its framework to incorporate these metrics.
French authorities have indicated they do not intend to weaken or narrow the scope of existing laws when transposing the directive. On the contrary, the directive is seen as a chance to strengthen the French system. This suggests that France may maintain the 50-employee threshold for its pay transparency obligations, rather than raising it to 100. Social partner discussions have debated this point: employer organizations advocate sticking to the directive’s minimum (covering only 100+ employee firms) to avoid “surtransposition,” but unions and the government’s equality advocates emphasize that France’s current 50+ regime captures many more firms and should be preserved or expanded. It remains to be seen what the final law will dictate, but HR in companies between 50 and 100 employees should be prepared that they will likely continue to have pay-gap reporting duties in France, despite the directive’s higher threshold.
Reporting content: In terms of data, the French Index today produces a single percentage score and sub-scores, which must be published on company websites. The new EU-aligned reporting will require publishing actual pay gap percentages (for example, “Company X has an overall gender pay gap of Y%” along with the breakdowns listed above). The French Ministry of Labour has indicated that the current five Index indicators will be replaced by the seven criteria of the European directive. In practice, this means French companies will start calculating the precise metrics mandated by EU (mean and median pay gaps, etc.) instead of (or in addition to) the Index’s composite scoring system. The idea is that these more detailed metrics will give a finer understanding of where gaps exist.
Publication and authorities: The directive requires that the reported data be made public and communicated to a designated monitoring body. France already operates the Egapro online platform (egapro.travail.gouv.fr) where companies upload their Index results, and the Ministry publishes all companies’ Index scores and indicators online.
If an employer’s pay reporting reveals a gender pay gap of over 5% in any category of workers that cannot be justified by objective, gender-neutral factors, the employer must, in cooperation with employee representatives, conduct an in-depth pay assessment and develop a plan to close the gap. The directive says that if such an unjustified gap persists, the assessment should be carried out within six months of the reporting. Essentially, the EU is mandating a trigger for collective action at the company level to investigate and correct pay disparities once they cross a 5% threshold.
Current French system: Under the Equality Index regime, there is no direct analogue to the “5% gap” rule. The Index does measure pay gaps, but it aggregates them into a score, and the obligation to act (i.e., implement corrective measures) is tied to the overall Index score falling below 75/100, not to a specific percentage gap in a particular category. In practice, a company could have, for example, a 10% pay gap in one job category, but if other indicators are fine, its Index might still be above 75. French law does require employers to negotiate annually on equality and to take action to address any identified inequalities, but there hasn’t been a fixed numeric trigger like “gap >5%, act immediately” in legislation. The approach has been more holistic and over a multi-year timeline (companies with a low Index have three years to improve before sanctions).
What will change: France will implement the directive’s joint pay assessment requirement. The Labour Minister explicitly highlighted that under the new directive criteria, any unexplained gap beyond 5% between women and men (within the same category of work) will mandatorily trigger corrective measures. This is a more granular and urgent obligation than the current Index mechanism. It means that when the new reporting data is produced, companies (and their worker representatives) will not be able to ignore significant outliers in pay. For example, if in ‘Category of Worker’ group X, women earn on average 8% less than men despite performing work of equal value, and the company cannot justify this difference with legitimate factors (like experience or performance criteria), then the employer must investigate and work with employee reps to correct the situation. This joint assessment likely involves unions or the CSE examining pay structures with management to identify the root causes of the gap.
Enforcement and remedies: Alongside the transparency measures, the EU directive strengthens enforcement mechanisms for equal pay, many of which France already broadly has, but will likely reinforce:
In summary, it seems like France will move from a somewhat flexible, results-over-time approach to a more immediate, data-triggered approach in line with the directive. Heads of HR and compensation professionals should treat the 5% gap rule as a clear compliance trigger: once the new law is in place, any significant pay gap in your organization’s internal pay reports must be either justified or eliminated in short order. Proactively, it would be smart to simulate these calculations now: identify if any roles or categories in your company have unexplained gender pay gaps around or above 5%. If so, start diagnosing the reasons or planning how to close those gaps, because in a couple of years, you will be required to do so with employee representatives watching. This “joint pay assessment” process will effectively function as a pay audit with accountability, so having your data and rationale ready is critical.
France’s journey to implement the EU Pay Transparency Directive is well underway, and it will lead to a significant tightening of pay equity obligations for employers. The first legislative draft of the transposition is expected by fall of 2025. French companies - especially those with 50+ employees - should begin preparing now:
In conclusion, France’s progress toward the Pay Transparency Directive signals a shift to a more open and accountability-driven model of pay equity. The Index de l’égalité laid the groundwork, and now the EU requirements will deepen it - requiring companies to show their work on pay fairness in detail and to act decisively on gaps. Companies that get ahead of these changes - by updating policies, crunching the numbers, and correcting course where needed - will not only avoid penalties but could emerge as employers of choice in a new era of transparency. As the French Ministry of Labour put it, these measures amount to a “cultural revolution” in how we talk about and manage salaries. For HR and reward professionals, the message is clear: it’s time to prepare, engage stakeholders, and ensure that come 2026, your pay practices stand up to the light of transparency and the principle of “à travail égal, salaire égal” - equal pay for equal work - now backed by stronger law.
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