What must a Polish employer already do during recruitment?
The amended Polish Labour Code requires an employer to inform an applicant of the pay applicable to the position. The information may take the form of a fixed amount or a range and should be based on objective, gender-neutral criteria.
Publishing the range in the vacancy notice is the clearest solution. Polish law also allows disclosure before the interview where no notice was published or the notice did not include pay, and no later than before the employment relationship begins where no interview took place or the information was not supplied earlier. The disclosure should not be postponed until the applicant has effectively accepted every other material term.
Where relevant, the employer must also make available the applicable provisions of a collective agreement or remuneration rules. Job titles and vacancy notices should be gender-neutral and the recruitment process must be non-discriminatory.
Why should recruiters stop asking about previous pay?
The Labour Code excludes current and previous salary information from the employment-history data that an employer may request. The objective is to prevent historic underpayment from becoming the anchor for the next salary decision.
The restriction affects more than the interview itself. A pay-history question may be embedded in an application form, recruiter spreadsheet, hiring-manager guide or automated HR tool. Where an external recruitment agency is involved, the agreement and brief should identify the permitted data and allocation of responsibility.
An employer may discuss the applicant’s expectations, provided that this does not become a device for avoiding the employer’s disclosure duty or replace an objective valuation of the role.
Which Directive requirements should not yet be presented as a complete set of binding Polish rules?
Directive (EU) 2023/970 establishes a broader system than the Polish recruitment amendment. It includes:
The Directive requires implementation through national law. Expiry of the transposition deadline does not by itself justify treating every provision as a complete, directly applicable code for private Polish employers. The legislative delay nevertheless does not remove risk: general equal-treatment and equal-pay rules already apply, and the final implementing legislation may leave limited time for systems and data preparation.
- pay structures that enable assessment of equal pay for equal work or work of equal value;
- access to the criteria used to determine pay, pay levels and pay progression;
- a worker’s right to written information about their individual pay level and average pay levels, broken down by sex, for a comparable category of workers;
- periodic gender-pay-gap reporting by employers with at least 100 workers, according to the thresholds and timetable set by the Directive;
- a joint pay assessment with worker representatives where a pay difference of at least 5% in a category is not justified by objective, gender-neutral factors and is not remedied within the required period; and
- remedies, compensation, sanctions and evidentiary rules designed to facilitate equal-pay claims.
How the issue appears in practice
Hypothetical example: a broad range without rules for using it
A technology company publishes a gross monthly range of PLN 12,000–20,000 for project managers. Recruiters select an offer by referring to the applicant’s previous salary and perceived negotiating strength. People performing comparable work are paid differently, but the company cannot identify consistent reasons for those differences. Publishing the range has not solved the underlying issue. The company should remove pay-history questions, define job levels, competencies and responsibility for each part of the range and review existing pay differences. Objective explanations should be documented. Unexplained differences require a remediation plan and changes to the way offers, increases and bonuses are decided.
How can a business prepare without waiting for the final legislation?
Start with a map of positions and roles. Job titles alone are not sufficient. The employer should compare the actual work, skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions. The criteria should be explainable and applied consistently.
The business should then test its data. Can the HR and payroll systems assign workers to comparable categories, calculate the relevant measures and reconstruct the reasons for individual pay decisions? A detected difference is not automatically discrimination. It may be explained by objective factors such as experience, responsibility or performance, but the employer should be able to demonstrate the explanation.
Legal basis
- Act of 26 June 1974 — Polish Labour Code, in particular Articles 18³a–18³e, 18³c, 22¹ and 18³ca.
- Act of 4 June 2025 amending the Polish Labour Code, Journal of Laws 2025, item 807.
- Directive (EU) 2023/970 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 10 May 2023 to strengthen the application of the principle of equal pay for equal work or work of equal value between men and women through pay transparency and enforcement mechanisms.
This article provides general information and does not constitute legal advice for a specific matter. The appropriate solution depends on the facts, documents and business objective.
Summary
Pay transparency is no longer only a future project in Poland: recruitment duties have applied since 24 December 2025. The full Directive framework still requires national implementation. A proportionate response is to correct recruitment immediately and, in parallel, build the role map, pay criteria and data needed for the wider regime — without presenting proposed solutions as law already in force.