Austria's Biennial Pay-Transparency Reports (Einkommensbericht, Equal Treatment Act §11a)

Since 2011, Section 11a of Austria's Equal Treatment Act has required private employers above a set headcount to prepare an 'Einkommensbericht' (income report) every two years, comparing average or median pay of women and men within each collective-agreement or company job group, adjusted for part-time and partial-year work. The threshold was phased down over time and today covers employers with more than 150 employees; reports go to the works council (or are posted for staff where none exists) rather than to a public authority, and the next filing deadline is 31 March 2026 — the final cycle before Austria must transpose the EU Pay Transparency Directive (2023/970/EU) by 7 June 2026.
An IZA Institute of Labor Economics discussion paper (Böheim & Gust, DP No. 14206) exploited the staggered size-based rollout to evaluate the law's causal effect using Austrian social security records. It found that, in aggregate, the transparency requirement did not reduce firms' gender wage gap or measurably change employment growth or turnover. It did find a partial effect for newly hired workers at large, newly covered firms, where women's starting wages rose relative to men's after the reform — and, in a counterintuitive result, a lower female employment share at large covered firms after implementation.
Austria's experience is included here as a cautionary, rigorously evaluated case: mandatory internal pay reporting on its own, without public disclosure or a correction mechanism, produced far weaker aggregate results than country cases with public reporting or notify-and-correct duties (e.g. Portugal, UK), which helps explain why the EU Directive superseding it adds public gap reporting and mandatory joint pay assessments above a 5% unexplained gap.

Read the full analysis: https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/14206/the-austrian-pay-transparency-law-and-the-gender-wage-gap