With Legislative Decree No. 96 of 7 May 2026, which entered into force on 7 June 2026, Italy transposed Directive (EU) 2023/970 on pay transparency, becoming one of the first Member States to complete the implementation of the new European rules on equal pay between women and men.
The measure represents one of the most significant developments in labour law in recent years, not because it introduces the principle of equal pay—which has long been established under both EU and Italian law—but because it seeks to make that principle genuinely measurable, verifiable, and enforceable through the introduction of pay transparency mechanisms.
For many years, however, the prohibition of pay discrimination has been hindered by a structural limitation: the lack of information. Without access to the criteria used to determine salaries or to the pay levels applied within an organisation, identifying potential disparities is often difficult—and proving them even more so.
The European Directive was specifically designed to address this information asymmetry by introducing a comprehensive framework of transparency obligations intended to affect the entire employment lifecycle, from recruitment and hiring through to career progression and pay management policies.
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