EU Pay Transparency rules 2027: How to prepare your hiring process with Homerun

Three things matter most for your hiring process. 

01: A salary range before the interview

Candidates must see a range before the interview, and at the latest before a contract is signed. It needs to be in the vacancy notice itself, not something you mention verbally later. 

02: No questions about pay history

Asking what someone would like to earn going forward is generally fine (check your local rules), but "what's your current salary?" is off the table. 

03: A right to request pay information

Employees and candidates can request pay information for equivalent roles, and you have a limited window, commonly two months, to respond. A clean record of why someone was offered what they were offered saves a lot of scrambling later.
‍
ENFORCEMENT IS UNEVEN — FOR NOW 

Only a handful of member states, Slovakia, Lithuania, Italy, Malta, Belgium and Greece, have fully transposed the Directive into national law so far. Others, like Ireland and the Netherlands, have said openly that they're behind schedule. Building these habits now means you're not retrofitting compliance under pressure once your local legislation lands. 

STEP 01 

Put a salary range on every vacancy 

Make the number part of the job post, not the conversation 

Homerun lets you add a salary indication range, currency and pay period to a vacancy. This information can be picked up by search engines when the vacancy is shared, but it does not automatically appear on the job post itself.

What to do in Homerun

— Go to each open vacancy and fill in the salary range, currency and pay period. This helps ensure the salary information is available to search engines.

— Also add the salary range directly to the job-post content itself. The information entered in the salary fields does not automatically appear in the visible job post, so this needs to be updated manually.

— Treat an empty salary field as a compliance gap, not just a missing detail. Make salary part of your job-posting checklist before you publish.

— If you post to external job boards, double-check that the salary range is actually showing up there too.— If a board integration isn't pulling the salary through yet, flag it to whoever manages that connection.
‍
TIP: Add the salary check to whatever pre-publish routine you already have, right next to spell-check and making sure the right hiring manager is tagged.

STEP 02 

• Clean up your application questions 

• One prohibited question, hiding in old templates 

• Pull up the questions you're asking on each application form and look specifically for anything that asks about current or past salary. That's the one the Directive prohibits outright. 

• "Expected salary" questions are usually still allowed, but double-check your specific country's rules, since implementation differs. Slovakia, Lithuania, Italy, Malta and Greece have full legislation in place; most others are still catching up. 

TIP: Review this per job post, not just once for your whole account, older, duplicated templates are usually where a stray "current salary" question hides.

STEP 03 

• Document your reasoning, not just your decision 

• Leave the trail while you still remember why 

• Use the comments on a candidate's profile to note why they were leveled or offered where they were, years of experience, specific skills, internal pay band, and so on. 

This isn't extra admin for its own sake. If a candidate later exercises their right to request pay data for their role, or you're ever audited on gender pay gaps, having this trail already in Homerun means you're not reconstructing it from memory or old emails months later.

TWO MONTHS IS NOT A LOT OF TIME 

Pay information requests come with a short response window. The difference between a calm reply and a scramble is whether the reasoning was written down at the moment the decision was made.

STEP 04 

• Set a data retention period Good hygiene to pair with everything above 

• Decide how long candidate data, including anything salary-related, should be kept, and set it in Homerun. 

• Shorter, deliberate retention reduces your exposure if a candidate requests their data or a dispute arises later. This isn't unique to pay transparency, but it belongs in the same routine.

A simple pre-publish checklist 

BEFORE A VACANCY GOES LIVE, CHECK 

- Salary range, currency and pay period are filled in 

- No application question asks about salary history — expected salary is OK, verify locally Job title and description are gender-neutral 

- Retention period is set

ONE THING TO FLAG WITH YOUR LEGAL TEAM 

The Directive's requirements are the floor. Exact thresholds, what counts as a "range," how expected salary questions are treated, reporting obligations if you have 150+ employees — depend on your country's specific transposition law, and those are still landing unevenly across the EU. Treat this guide as the operational baseline, and loop in legal or HR compliance for the country-specific edge cases.

READY TO PUT THIS INTO PRACTICE? 

None of this has to be a big lift. 

Build the habit into vacancies you're already publishing, and by the time your local legislation is fully in force, you won't be scrambling to catch up. Log in to Homerun and run through the checklist on your next open vacancy or start a free trial if you're not on Homerun yet.