Lithuania is leading the way in the EU with a new labour code

Thursday, Jun 18, 2026

EU pay transparency rules aim to reduce gender pay gaps, granting workers rights to salary info and mandating employer reporting on pay disparities. Member states adopt these varyingly.

🔗 Read the article on delfi.lt


[This is an automatically generated summary, for reference only]

The European Union’s Pay Transparency Directive aims to reduce gender pay gaps and ensure equal pay for equal or equivalent work by establishing several key elements, such as giving employees the right to salary information before employment, prohibiting employers from asking about past salaries, banning confidentiality agreements on pay, allowing employees to inquire about average wages for comparison, requiring large employers (over 100 staff) to report gender pay gaps, and mandating overall pay assessments when potential discrimination exists.

Lithuania is progressing with the directive’s transposition into national law, having become the second EU member after Slovakia to do so. While some provisions are set to take effect in stages (e.g., June 2026 for most requirements, December 2026 for employers to update pay systems), employees will only be able to access personal data from the State Social Insurance Fund starting in 2027, meaning practical availability might not occur until 2028.

Other EU countries show varied progress: Austria is lagging and has already missed its deadline, with employer groups actively opposing the directive due to concerns about excessive bureaucracy. Sweden is also implementing slowdown measures, arguing that the EU model does not fit its existing national system. Ireland has also passed the deadline but aims for quick implementation while still being required to report pay gaps. Spain has prepared a draft directive currently under review, and only a small fraction of job listings across the EU provide transparent salary ranges.


🔗 Read the original article

© 2026 Pulse - Europe beyond the beat


PULSE is an initiative for cross-border collaborative journalism in Europe co-funded by the European Commission under Grant Agreement n. PO 4500158093.

PULSE – Europe beyond the beat is an initiative coordinated by OBCT which has been promoting intense journalistic cross-border collaborations in Europe since 2024. The main aim is to help strengthen the European public sphere by reporting and telling stories from new and diverse perspectives.

PULSE’s offering also includes the distribution of free content to third-party outlets and the animation of four thematic networks open to any European journalist interested in crucial issues such as EU enlargement, Europe and other global powers, the green transition, or media and information society.

PULSE is driven by a sort of virtual transnational newsroom made up of journalists from all the publications involved, which produces new journalistic content on European issues in a collaborative way on a daily basis, coming in many languages. A further layer of associated partners and journalists enriches PULSE’s editorial output, which amounts to over a thousand publications per year.