Guidance on complying with mandatory wage registration
Mandatory wage registration
The Spanish Government published in the BOE a new decree aimed at guaranteeing equal pay for men and women. This is Royal Decree 902/2020, of 13 October, on equal pay for women and men, which stipulates that all companies must have a wage register from April 2021. Here we tell you what the compulsory pay register must look like
The pay register is a document that must contain all the company’s salary information, in detail, showing separately the salaries of men and women in your workforce. The purpose of this register is to ensure transparency of remuneration and to facilitate access to this information, regardless of the size of the company.
This document should include all information on salaries, including management and senior management.
Who is obliged to keep a mandatory pay register?
All companies will have to keep a pay register for their entire workforce, including management and senior management.
Deadlines
The obligation to keep a pay register has already existed since 2019. However, an adaptation period of 6 months was established to adapt to the new commitments. As of 13 April 2021, all companies must have a remuneration register adapted to Royal Decree 902/2020.
What is it for?
It has several objectives:
– To serve as a reference tool to analyse the causes of differences in remuneration and whether gender is one of them.
– To improve pay transparency in order to bring discrimination to light. In fact, female employees have the right to access, through the legal representation of workers in the company, to their company’s wage register.
– Demand justification for deviations. When there is a pay gap of more than 25% in a company with more than 50 employees, the employer must justify the reasons.
– Be part of the information that the company has to provide to the works council at least once a year. This also includes the proportion of women and men at different professional levels and the measures taken to promote equality.
– Facilitate the pay audits that companies obliged to draw up an equality plan must undergo.
How is the Pay Register carried out?
The mandatory pay register must include the following data disaggregated by sex:
– Total annual salary and gender pay gap.
– Annual basic salary and gender pay gap.
– Annual salary supplements and gender gap for this concept.
– Extra salary payments and gender gap for this concept.
– Annual overtime and overtime payments and the gender gap for this concept.
Each of these should be broken down by professional category, professional group and job. In addition, the arithmetic mean and median of what is actually received for each occupational group, category, post, etc. should be established.
All information shall be broken down by gender and according to the nature of the remuneration, including basic salary, all allowances and non-wage payments, in a differentiated manner. The reference period shall be 1 calendar year, unless there are substantial changes in any of the concepts.
The workers’ legal representative must be consulted 10 days before the register is drawn up and before it is modified. In the event of any anomaly or malpractice in equal pay, the company must include in the document what measures it will implement to rectify these circumstances.
Where the company has more than 50 employees and there is a difference of 25% or more between the salaries of men and women, a justification that the difference is not related to the gender of the workforce must be included in the pay record.
Equal pay for work of equal value
The obligation of equal pay for work of equal value is regulated, defining what is considered to be work of equal value: work that performs the same functions, with the same factors and working conditions and requires the same professional or training requirements for its performance.
In addition, the principle of pay transparency must be applied in the pay registers, as well as in the pay audits and job evaluation system, which is also included in the regulation and will be discussed below.
Penalties for not having the mandatory pay register in place
The absence of the pay register may lead to administrative and judicial action and/or the application of sanctions for discrimination.
Companies that falsify or fail to keep the pay register may be sanctioned according to the system of offences and penalties of the LISOS, depending on the seriousness of the facts. For the most severe offences, penalties of between 6,251 and 187,515 euros may be imposed.
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