When will Portugal pass its pay transparency law? The deadline was 7 June
The EU directive makes employers tell candidates what a job pays before the interview, bans asking what they earned before, and requires larger companies to publish their gender pay gaps. Portugal has still not published the law transposing it.
A date written into European law has come and gone with almost no noise. Directive (EU) 2023/970 set 7 June 2026 as the deadline for member states to transpose it, and Portugal has reached August without publishing the law that does so.
This is not a technicality. It is the directive that kills off the job ad reading “salary to be discussed”.
What the directive actually requires
Four concrete things, and every one of them touches people looking for work or already in it.
Candidates get the right to know the starting pay for a role, or the band it sits in, before the interview. Employers lose the right to ask what someone earned in their last job, a question whose main function is to drag a low salary from one employer to the next. People already inside a company can ask for average pay levels, broken down by sex, for work of equal value. And larger employers have to report their gender pay gaps: annually above 250 staff, every three years between 100 and 249.
There is also an automatic trigger. If a report shows a gap of 5% or more in a category of workers, and the employer cannot justify it on objective, gender-neutral criteria, it has to run a joint pay assessment with workers’ representatives and fix what it finds, to a timetable.
So what applies right now?
Until a Portuguese law exists, these obligations are not written into Portuguese law, and that is what matters if you try to hold a private employer to them today. Missing a transposition deadline is not free for the state either: it opens the door to infringement proceedings from the European Commission.
If you are negotiating pay this summer, the useful move is the old-fashioned one — walk into the conversation with numbers, and it is worth knowing which sectors pay best in Portugal before you say one out loud.
Quick questions
Does the salary have to appear in the ad?
The directive requires the candidate to be informed before the interview. Publishing it in the advert is the simplest way to comply, but the duty is to inform, not necessarily to advertise.
Does it apply to small companies?
The recruitment transparency rules apply to all employers. The periodic reporting duties start at 100 workers.
Image: European Parliament / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
