The Hague: Dutch employers spent the summer preparing for a pay transparency law their own government has not yet passed, and on 8 September 2026 they are still waiting. The Netherlands missed the 7 June 2026 deadline for writing Directive 2023/970 into national law and now aims for 1 January 2027, joining a large majority of member states that let the date pass.

Only four governments transposed the directive in full by the deadline. Italy, Slovakia, Lithuania and Malta cleared the bar. The other twenty-three did not, which leaves workers across most of the Union holding rights that exist in Brussels and nowhere in their national statute book.

The European Commission has refused every request to soften the pay transparency timetable. Equality Commissioner Hadja Lahbib rejected both a pause and a simplification exercise when employer groups asked for one, and Commission officials expect letters of formal notice to reach late transposers before the end of the year. That letter opens an Article 258 track running through a reasoned opinion and, if a capital still does not legislate, to the Court of Justice and financial penalties.

The directive itself leaves little room for argument. It obliges employers to tell job applicants, in the words of Article 5, “the initial pay or its range” before the interview, and it bars them from asking candidates what they earned in a previous job. Workers gain a right to ask what colleagues doing equal work are paid, broken down by sex. Employers who report a gender pay gap above five per cent in any category of worker, and who cannot justify it on objective grounds, must run a joint pay assessment with worker representatives.

Article 5 requires employers to give applicants “the initial pay or its range” before any interview, and forbids questions about previous salary.

Reporting duties, the part of pay transparency that produces public numbers, arrive next. Employers with 150 or more staff file their first pay gap report by 7 June 2027, covering the 2026 pay year. Companies with 250 or more report every year after that; those between 150 and 249 report once every three years. Smaller employers of 100 to 149 staff join the cycle in 2031.

That sequence explains why late transposition matters more than it looks. The 2027 report draws on payroll data companies are generating right now. A firm operating in Belgium, Germany and Spain has to build one reporting system while three legislatures argue about the details, and each national text may name its own enforcement body, write its own definition of a category of worker, and set its own penalties.

• Transposition deadline: 7 June 2026
• Member states compliant on time: 4 of 27
• First reports for employers with 150 or more staff: 7 June 2027
• Pay gap threshold triggering a joint assessment: 5 per cent
• Netherlands and Denmark target date: 1 January 2027

Employers face a further complication. The directive shifts the burden of proof onto the employer in equal pay disputes, so a worker who presents a plausible case of discrimination forces the company to prove the difference rests on objective, sex-neutral criteria. National courts apply that rule the moment the transposing law enters into force, whenever that happens.

The text of Directive 2023/970 dates from May 2023, giving capitals three years to legislate. Most spent the time consulting rather than drafting. Several governments blame the volume of social legislation arriving at once, others the difficulty of defining equal work across job families that pay differently for reasons nobody has ever had to justify on paper.

The Commission publishes its infringement decisions in monthly packages, and a non-communication case of this size normally moves fast through the early stages because nobody disputes the facts. A government either notified national measures or it did not. What follows is slower. Capitals usually legislate under the pressure of a reasoned opinion rather than a first letter, which points to national laws landing through 2027, well after the reporting obligation they are meant to underpin has already bitten.