Equal Pay (Transparency and Reporting) Regulations 2026 — Malta's Full Transposition of the EU Pay Transparency Directive

Directive (EU) 2023/970 required all EU member states to transpose pay-transparency rules by 7 June 2026. Malta was among the small group that met the deadline, doing so through a two-step process.
Phase one: Legal Notice 112 of 2025, effective 27 August 2025, amended Malta's Transparent and Predictable Working Conditions Regulations to require employers to disclose starting salary or pay range to job applicants and to let employees request average pay data for workers doing the same work — but this phase did not extend the right to information to comparisons of 'work of equal value', a gap short of the Directive's full requirement.
Phase two: the Equal Pay (Transparency and Reporting) Regulations 2026, published 5 June 2026, closed that gap and added the remaining machinery — mandatory reporting, joint pay assessments and enforcement. Employers with 250 or more employees must file their first gender pay-gap report by 7 June 2027 (covering 2026 data) and annually thereafter; those with 150–249 employees report on the same first date but then every three years; employers with 100–149 employees have until 2031. The right-to-information response window is tightened to 8 working days — far stricter than the Directive's default 2 months — with escalation to employee representatives after 12 days and to the Equality Body (the National Commission for the Promotion of Equality) if unresolved after 45 days. Where a reported pay gap of 5% or more is unjustified and unresolved after six months, employers must conduct a joint pay assessment with worker representatives. Fines range from €2,500–€5,000 for general breaches to €5,000–€7,000 where equal-pay principles are breached; the Department for Industrial and Employment Relations is the Monitoring Body.
As in comparable transpositions, no employer has yet filed a report under the new regime — the first is due in June 2027 — so there is no evidence yet of any actual narrowing of Malta's gender pay gap. The regulation's value so far is procedural and institutional (tighter deadlines, a named escalation path, and a joint-assessment trigger), not a demonstrated outcome.

Read the full analysis: https://synd.io/global-pay-gap-reporting-guides/malta/