Which directive obligations are you building first when the first report covers 2026 pay?

I would push back slightly. The recruitment piece is the one that is visible to the outside world from day one, and it was the cheapest for us to do: a range on the advert and removing the salary history question from the application form took three weeks. Doing that first bought us credibility with the works council while the heavy data work carried on behind it.

What we regretted leaving late was the categories of workers. Everything else hangs off them: the report is by category, the information right is by category, and the 5% trigger is tested by category. We built the data pipeline first and then had to rerun it twice when the groupings changed.

So my order would be: agree the equal-value categories with the works council, then the pay component mapping, then the reporting run. Recruitment changes can go in parallel because they need almost none of the same people. The request process came last for us and took about a month, most of it deciding who answers and in what format.

Thank you all. We have agreed this week to lock the categories with the works council by the end of November and to do the advert changes in parallel through talent acquisition rather than my team. The information-request process moves to the first quarter. Helpful to hear that the pipeline reruns are the real cost of getting the order wrong.