UK Equal Pay Consultation 2026: What Does It Mean
On 14 July 2026, the UK Government opened a 15-week consultation period on new equal pay measures. Whilst not as prescriptive as the full EU Pay Transparency Directive, it does follow similar principles.
Background
The consultation follows the UK government's call for evidence on equality law, which found that the current equal pay system is, in its own words, “too complex, too costly, and too slow”, with claims routinely taking years, sometimes decades, to resolve. Three commissioned research reports (findings published alongside the consultation) found that pay discrimination persisted for women, ethnic minority workers, disabled workers, and outsourced staff, despite legal protections that are, on paper, over 50 years old. Equalities Minister Seema Malhotra noted that the Equal Pay Act "needs reform to ensure it works for everyone."
What's being proposed
The consultation is split into two phases.
Phase one proposes to:
increase pay transparency to catch discrimination before it happens,
reform the claims process to make it faster and cheaper, and
create a new Equal Pay Regulation and Enforcement Unit with powers to enforce the law, rather than leaving it entirely to individual litigants.
Phase two proposes to widen the net by:
extending equal pay protections more comprehensively to race and disability (not just sex, which is where the law has historically focused); and,
requiring employers to take "reasonable steps" to uphold pay equality in outsourcing arrangements, closing a loophole where companies could sidestep equal pay duties by routing work through agencies, contractors, or umbrella companies.
What this means in practice
One of the key changes would be Pay transparency in job ads. The UK government is consulting on requiring employers to publish pay information in job adverts, or hand it to candidates in writing before interview if no advert is used. This would put the UK in step with pay-range disclosure laws already in force in New York and California, and move it closer to the EU's Pay Transparency Directive.
Another big change to the proposal is to allow the use of hypothetical comparators. Equal pay claims currently require a real comparator doing equivalent work. The consultation proposes allowing a hypothetical comparator in two narrowly defined scenarios. This is useful where a lack of workplace diversity means there's no real person to compare against, but still anchored to a real person's circumstances rather than a purely theoretical one.
Who's weighing in
The response to the consultation so far has been broadly welcoming. The TUC has called the reform "a step in the right direction," particularly on extending protections by race and disability. Business in the Community and the Fawcett Society have both framed it as a genuine opportunity to reset transparency and accountability, rather than just more red tape. The Young Women's Trust struck a more urgent note, pointing out that young women still earn around a fifth less than young men from the start of their careers — a gap that compounds over time when pay is set based on salary history.
What employers should do with the next 15 weeks
This is a consultation, so when it closes on 27 October, no legislation has been passed yet. But three things are worth doing now rather than later.
Read the consultation document itself, not just the press coverage, especially if pay transparency or outsourced labour is relevant to your business.
Consider responding — the government is explicitly asking businesses, trade unions, and civil society to shape the detail, and the organisations that engage now tend to have more influence over the final shape of the rules than the ones that wait to react to legislation.
Start auditing your own pay structures against the direction of travel: if job-ad transparency and outsourcing accountability are coming, the businesses that get ahead of it will have an easier time rather than scrambling to meet requirements if the law passes
It's also worth remembering this consultation didn't emerge in a vacuum. Tribunals have already been testing exactly the kind of justification employers rely on to defend pay gaps, and finding it wanting. A prime example is detailed in my Blog on Tesco v Element.
Next week, I'll dig into the Next equal pay ruling, where a tribunal rejected the retailer's "market forces" defence outright and left it facing a bill north of £30 million. It's a preview of exactly the kind of dispute this consultation is trying to make faster, fairer, and less catastrophic for everyone involved.
If you don’t think your pay bands will survive this level of scrutiny, now's the time to find out. Bridgit's Pay Transparency tool already supports what this consultation is proposing: mapping your roles into clear, evidence-based pay bands, evaluating equal-value work against objective criteria, and flagging gaps before a regulator — or a tribunal — does it for you. If you want to see where your organisation stands before the rules change, get in touch or book a demo.