How should we group employees into categories, and what is work of equal value?

Act No. 76/2026 Coll. on equal pay for men and women rests on a single concept from which almost everything else follows: the category of employees. The employer answers an employee’s request for average pay by category (Section 6(1)), reports gaps by category in the pay report (Section 8(1)(g)), and the five per cent gap that may trigger a joint pay assessment is measured within a category (Section 9(1)). Badly constructed categories therefore distort every figure the business works with later.

What the Act requires

By category the Act means employees performing the same work or work of equal value whom the employer has grouped according to the criteria of its pay structure and, where employee representatives operate at the workplace, after consulting them (Section 2(1)(h)). The criteria themselves are set out in Section 3:

The pay structure must make it possible to assess whether employees perform the same work or work of equal value, which is determined on the basis of objective criteria which (a) are not based, directly or indirectly, on sex, (b) include complexity, responsibility, effort, working conditions and other factors relevant to the particular job or position, having regard to soft skills, in particular social and communication abilities, (c) are applied in an objective manner not based on discrimination.

— Section 3(1) of Act No. 76/2026 Coll. (unofficial English translation)

Where employee representatives operate at your workplace, you must agree the criteria with them (Section 3(2)). The criteria by which you determine pay and its level must also be made available to employees (Section 5).

The same work and work of equal value

The same work is performed by people in the same position with the same duties. Work of equal value is broader: different jobs which, once assessed against the criteria of Section 3, prove comparably demanding. Positions in different departments with different titles may therefore belong to one category, and conversely two positions with the same title to different categories if their actual content differs.

The comparison is not confined to people employed at the same time; an employee may also compare themselves with their predecessor. If no comparator can be found, the assessment considers how the employee would have been treated in a comparable situation (Section 13). Under Section 119a(2) of the Labour Code, employees of the same sex also have the right to equal pay for the same work or work of equal value, and for them too the same work or work of equal value is determined by the criteria of the Equal Pay Act.

How to proceed

1. An inventory of positions by actual content. The starting point is what people actually do, not the organisational chart or the titles in employment contracts.
2. Assessment against the criteria. For each position, assess complexity, responsibility, effort, working conditions and soft skills. The Act does not prescribe a method; point-scoring scales are common. The Act required the Ministry of Labour to prepare and publish analytical tools and methodologies for assessing the value of work (Section 14(4), Section 18(6)).
3. Grouping into categories. Combine positions with comparable assessments. If your pay is not governed by a collective agreement, you already assign jobs to degrees of difficulty under Section 120(3) of the Labour Code. These can serve as an aid, but the criteria of the Equal Pay Act are broader, for instance as regards soft skills.
4. Recording and consultation. Record the criteria and the grouping; where employee representatives operate at your workplace, agree the criteria with them and consult them on the categories. Recorded criteria are later the principal evidence that pay differences have an objective basis.

Common mistakes

• A category based on the job title. An “officer” in accounts and an “officer” at reception need not perform work of equal value.
• Categories that are too small. If a category has two people, a colleague’s pay can be derived from the average and you cannot provide the information under Section 6(1)(b); the comparison also loses its meaning.
• Criteria with an indirect effect. Check whether some criterion, for example uninterrupted service, indirectly disadvantages employees returning from maternity or parental leave. The Act expressly tracks pay increases following such a return (Section 9(3)(e)).

How we can help

We design and record categories and criteria through pay transparency and incorporate them into a pay policy or other internal rule through internal regulations and policies. How to use categories when answering an employee is explained in our answer on an employee’s request for pay information.