27/05/2026
In recent years, pay transparency has moved beyond the strict sphere of equal opportunities policy and has become one of the central themes of the reform of employment relationships at European level. In this context, the draft law on pay transparency marks a significant paradigm shift in Romanian employment law, turning pay from a predominantly confidential matter into one increasingly subject to the requirements of legal justification and verifiability.
The draft law on pay transparency is one of the most important conceptual changes in Romanian employment law in recent years. Although public debate has focused almost exclusively on combating pay discrimination between women and men, the real effects of the future legislation go considerably beyond this dimension. In reality, the draft changes the very legal logic of employment relationships by shifting the emphasis from the confidentiality of remuneration to the objective and verifiable justification of pay differences.
Until now, pay has traditionally been treated as an almost exclusively internal element of the employment relationship, falling within the employer’s autonomy and individual negotiation. In practice, pay differences were rarely explained by clearly documented criteria, and remuneration policies often operated informally, influenced by the time of hiring, individual bargaining power, the company’s needs or the economic context at a given moment. It is precisely this culture of pay opacity that the new legislation seeks to change.
It should be noted that the principle of equal pay for equal work or work of equal value is not new in Romanian law. It is expressly enshrined both in Article 41(4) of the Constitution and in the provisions of the Labour Code.
In addition, European Union law has treated equal pay as a fundamental principle for decades. The practical problem, however, has not been the absence of a legal rule, but the near-impossible difficulty for a worker to prove the existence of pay discrimination. In most cases, the employee had no access to the information needed to make an effective comparison between their own remuneration and that of other persons in comparable situations. From this perspective, pay confidentiality has often operated not only as a legitimate mechanism for protecting private life, but also as an evidentiary obstacle.
The new draft seeks precisely to reduce this information asymmetry. Transparency obligations at the recruitment stage, the worker’s right to request information on pay levels and the reporting obligations imposed on certain employers fundamentally change the traditional philosophy of employment relationships. Pay ceases to be an exclusively internal matter and becomes an element open to legal scrutiny. In essence, the draft does not eliminate pay differences; it requires the employer to be able to explain in legal terms why they exist.
This change is profound and will have a significant impact on the way companies organise their human resources policies. In reality, many organisations in Romania do not have sufficiently clear and verifiable pay criteria. Differences in remuneration are frequently justified by general formulas such as “performance”, “experience”, “value to the company” or “complexity of the work”, without any genuinely quantifiable indicators. In such a context, pay transparency will inevitably lead to a marked formalisation of remuneration policies. Employers will be obliged to turn flexible internal practices into documented and legally defensible mechanisms.
This development can, of course, have important positive effects. In the absence of objective and transparent criteria, the risk of arbitrary pay decisions is real. At the same time, access to information can reduce the situations in which pay differences are maintained solely because they cannot be verified. Nevertheless, the effects of the draft should not be idealised.
There is a risk that the new legal framework will lead to excessive bureaucratisation of employment relationships and to a defensive reaction on the part of employers. In practice, many companies might respond by excessively standardising remuneration, limiting the flexibility of individual negotiation and rigidly formalising internal mechanisms, solely in order to reduce legal risks.
In this sense, pay transparency may sometimes produce formal compliance without necessarily generating real fairness. The risk is all the greater for small and medium-sized enterprises, which do not have sophisticated HR structures or complex professional assessment mechanisms. For such employers, the reporting, documentation and justification obligations may become disproportionately burdensome.
Another major difficulty concerns the notion of “work of equal value”. Although the concept is established at European level, its practical application remains extremely difficult. Comparability between two positions requires complex assessments of responsibility, qualifications, working conditions, skills and the level of effort involved. In practice, the line between legitimate and discriminatory pay differences will often be difficult to draw.
There are fields in which the labour market operates according to a logic strongly influenced by supply and demand, and pay differences are also driven by staff shortages, the specific features of the industry or individual bargaining power. In the absence of clear and coherent methodologies, there is a risk that the notion of “work of equal value” will remain excessively elastic and give rise to inconsistent practices.
At the same time, the draft also raises serious issues from the perspective of personal data protection. Remuneration undoubtedly has an obvious private dimension, and the tension between transparency and confidentiality will inevitably become one of the most sensitive practical issues under the new legislation.
Even though the draft seeks to limit access to individualised data and refers to Regulation (EU) 2016/679, significant difficulties may arise in practice, particularly in small structures or highly specialised professions, where the mere communication of average values may allow the indirect identification of the data subjects.
It is very likely that the first years of application of the new legislation will also be marked by a significant increase in legal disputes. Greater access to pay information will inevitably generate more internal challenges, more discrimination complaints and much closer scrutiny of the criteria used to set remuneration. Paradoxically, pay transparency might initially produce more organisational tension, not less. Many of the pay differences that currently exist have never been legally tested or documented sufficiently to withstand effective scrutiny.
Beyond the legitimate aim of the reform, the draft also raises certain issues of legislative technique. Some of the wording is insufficiently clear, and the delimitation of powers between ANES (the National Agency for Equal Opportunities for Women and Men), CNCD (the National Council for Combating Discrimination) and the Labour Inspectorate risks creating overlaps and practical difficulties in application. Moreover, a significant part of the obligations imposed on employers is worded in relatively general terms, which will inevitably transfer a substantial part of the burden of interpretation to the courts and administrative authorities.
Overall, the general direction of the reform is justified both by the obligation to transpose Directive (EU) 2023/970 and by the real need to make the right to equal pay effective. Nevertheless, what is truly at stake in the draft is neither the elimination of all pay differences nor the standardisation of remuneration. In reality, the new legislation seeks to turn pay from an almost exclusively confidential matter into one open to permanent legal justification. It is precisely this obligation to justify that is probably the most important conceptual change that pay transparency brings to contemporary Romanian employment law.
Author: P.A.
