Pay transparency is no longer a fringe HR topic. It is fast becoming a regulatory and reputational imperative across Europe and the UK will not be exempt for long.
The EU Pay Transparency Directive requires member states to bring in national laws by June 2026, compelling employers to share salary information with candidates and employees and to report on gender pay gaps. The UK sits outside the EU, but the direction of travel was set out clearly in the King's Speech in July 2024, which confirmed the incoming Labour government's commitment to strengthen pay gap reporting and close loopholes that allow unequal pay to persist.
Organisations that treat pay transparency as a compliance exercise to be managed at the last minute will miss the point entirely. Our own data shows that employees are already deeply unsettled by how pay decisions are made and communicated and that unease is quietly eroding trust, engagement and retention.
Insight 1: Trust in the pay system is fragile
Only 1 in 3 employees say they trust their organisation's pay system, with an average trust score of just 3.14 out of 5. That is not a rounding error. It signals that for a large share of the workforce, pay decisions feel opaque, inconsistent or unfair.
Insight 2: Women are more concerned than men
89% of women report concern about pay gaps, compared to 79% of men. Both figures are high, but the gap between them reflects a lived difference in how fairly employees believe the system treats them.
Insight 3: Career progression feels unfair
Only 33% of employees feel that career progression in their organisation is fair. Pay and progression are closely linked and when advancement feels arbitrary, pay decisions inherit that same sense of unfairness.
Pay transparency is not just a legal requirement. It is a test of whether an organisation's culture matches what it says about fairness.
Insight 4: Many employees would not know how to respond
17.5% of men say they would not know how to respond if they discovered they were being underpaid relative to a colleague. That uncertainty is itself a signal, pointing to a lack of clear, trusted channels for raising pay concerns.
Insight 5: Women are more likely to raise concerns
64.3% of women say they would raise the issue with their manager if underpaid, while 24.8% would start looking for another job. This split matters for retention planning: pay dissatisfaction that goes unaddressed does not stay quiet, it turns into attrition.
Insight 6: Non-binary employees feel the least able to speak up
30% of non-binary employees say they would leave their organisation if they discovered they were underpaid and only 56% would feel able to raise the issue at all. This is the clearest warning sign in the data: a meaningful share of this group sees exit as more accessible than an internal conversation.
What this means for employers
Regulation will eventually force disclosure. But the organisations that get ahead of it, by building genuine trust in how pay decisions are made and communicated, will be better placed to retain talent and avoid the reputational cost of being seen to react only when the law requires it.
Measuring perception data around pay, trust and fairness gives leaders an early warning system, long before a formal pay audit or a regulator asks the question.