From 7 June 20026 the new rules on salary transparency come into force, which will apply to all public and private employers. On 30 April 2026 the Council of Ministers definitively approved the legislative decree (Legislative Decree no. 96/2026) which transposes the European Directive 2023/970 on pay transparency.
The declared objective is only one: to reduce the wage gap between men and women by making wages less opaque, from the moment you look for work until you are already hired. But what really changes in practice, and what remains unchanged despite what you read around?
What does the decree on salary transparency provide?
The transposing legislative decree (government act no. 379) is built on three distinct levels of intervention: that which concerns those looking for work, that which concerns those who are already employed and that which concerns larger companies.
- The first level is the most visible. From 7 June all job advertisements – public and private – must indicate the starting salary or salary range expected for that position. The criteria must be objective and gender-neutral. That’s not enough: it is forbidden to ask candidates for information on the salaries received in previous employment relationships, and this prohibition applies even if an external agency carries out the selection. The mechanism that the law wants to interrupt is that by which previous salary inequalities are automatically carried over from one job to the next: if the offer is anchored to the previous salary, an unjustified gap in the past is reproduced in the future.
- The second level concerns workers already in force. Article 7 of the decree recognizes each worker’s right to request from their employer, in writing, the average salary levels – divided by gender – of the category of colleagues carrying out the same work or work of equal value. The employer has two months to respond. Companies with at least one hundred employees can fulfill this obligation by publishing data directly on the company intranet. Article 7 also establishes that no employer can prohibit their employees from talking about their salary: contractual confidentiality clauses on salaries are expressly prohibited.
- The third level involves companies above the threshold of one hundred employees, which will have to periodically collect and communicate a series of data on the gender pay gap: the difference between the average salaries of men and women, the median values, the distribution by quartiles, the incidence of the variable components. The deadlines vary based on size: companies with at least 250 employees must communicate the data by 7 June 2027, those between 150 and 249 employees by the same date but every three years, those between 100 and 149 employees by 7 June 2031. If the analysis reveals an unjustified gap of more than 5% between men and women doing the same job, the company is obliged to start a joint assessment with the workers’ representatives and to define a corrective plan.
The myth to dispel: no, you will not see your boss’s paycheck
One of the most widespread – and most wrong – readings of salary transparency is that from June everyone will be able to know how much their colleagues or boss earn. This is not the case, and the decree says so explicitly in several places.
What a worker can request is the average gender pay of the category to which he belongs, not the individual pay of anyone else. Article 7, paragraph 7, is very precise on this: the information obtained in the exercise of the right to information cannot in any way make the individual economic conditions of other workers known, either directly or indirectly. The Guarantor for the protection of personal data contributed to strengthening this approach in the definitive approved text. What changes, therefore, is not individual transparency but systemic transparency: you will be able to understand if, on average, your category is paid equally between men and women, not how much the individual colleague earns.
This also applies to the data that large companies will have to communicate to the monitoring body established at the Ministry of Labor: they are aggregate data, designed to detect structural patterns of discrimination, not to make individual pay slips public.
How the control system and sanctions of Legislative Decree no. work. 96/2026
The decree establishes a monitoring body at the Ministry of Labor, in which representatives of ISTAT, INPS, INAPP, CNEL and the comparatively more representative trade union confederations participate. Its task is to collect the data communicated by companies, publish it in an accessible form and send a periodic report to the European Commission, the first by 7 June 2028.
In terms of sanctions, the decree refers to article 41 of the Equal Opportunities Code. The confirmed violations expose employers to judicial consequences, with the particularity that in the case of pay discrimination the burden of proof is reversed: it is not the worker who has to prove that he has been discriminated against, but it is the employer who has to demonstrate that the gap is justified by objective criteria. A criticism raised during the parliamentary process by ASviS remains open: the administrative sanctions envisaged, between 250 and 1,500 euros, risk being little dissuasive compared to the extent of the violations.
Italy first in Europe, but not all countries are on equal terms
Directive 2023/970 sets 7 June 2026 as the deadline for transposition in all Member States. Italy, with the final approval on April 30, arrived at the last moment, but is still among the very first large European countries to have completed the process – together with Slovakia, which had implemented it in advance. Most other EU countries, including France, Germany and Spain, were still in the process of developing implementing rules at the end of May 2026, according to updated data from Ius Laboris.
The gender pay gap that the directive aims to close is still significant at European level. According to Eurostat data referring to 2023, in the European Union women earn on average 12.7% less than men on gross hourly wages. In Italy the figure is more contained – around 4-5% of the hourly wage – but rises significantly if we consider the monthly and annual wage, where the lower number of hours worked and the lower female employment rate amplify the real gap. According to the 2024 INPS gender report, when calculating the daily wage the difference rises to 25%.
It is worth mentioning that Germany already had a law on pay transparency since 2017 – the Entgelttransparenzgesetz – but with limited scope and little practical effectiveness. The European directive was also born from the recognition that existing national instruments were not sufficient, and imposes for the first time a binding minimum standard across the Union, with reporting obligations, enforcement mechanisms and protection against retaliation for those who exercise their rights.
