June 2026 is closer than you think.
The EU Pay Transparency Directive demands explainable grading, pay gap analysis, and audit-ready reports. A consulting project costs €200K and takes 9 months. Get Ikigai delivers in weeks.
Our job architecture is a patchwork of historical decisions with no defensible logic. When the Works Council or an auditor asks why two roles sit in different bands, we have a spreadsheet and a shrug — not a justification that survives scrutiny.
AI-powered job architecture: grading from actual skill complexity, decision scope, impact. Employee grading with written justification based on the four EU criteria. Pay equity dashboard with real-time anomaly detection.
- Grading coverage: 30–50% → 95–100%
- Time to grade a role: 2–5 days → 15–30 minutes
- Compliance reports: 2–4 weeks → on demand
- Gender pay gap monitoring: annual → real-time
- Cost of job architecture: €150–250K → €4,800 assessment
- Time to compliance: 6–12 months → weeks
Check your Pay Transparency Readiness.
Watch a role move from raw description to graded, justified, and audit-ready in minutes.
Heads of Compensation & Benefits, Reward leads, and HR executives accountable for EU Pay Transparency Directive compliance by June 2026. Your KPI: every role graded, every pay difference explainable, every report audit-ready — without a nine-month consulting engagement.
- The June 2026 deadline is a cliff. You need a complete job architecture, grading framework, and pay equity analysis — and most organisations haven’t started.
- Consulting projects don’t scale. €150–250K and 6–12 months buys you a one-off deliverable that’s stale the moment a new role is posted.
- Spreadsheets leave you exposed. No audit trail, no written justification per role, no way to defend the gender pay gap number when the regulator or Works Council asks.
How Get Ikigai solves it
- AI-derived job architecture. Grading is computed from actual skill complexity, decision scope, and impact — not historical job titles.
- Written justification per role. Every grade cites the four EU criteria (skills, effort, responsibility, working conditions) in plain language an auditor can read.
- Real-time pay equity detection. Anomalies, band violations and gender pay gap drift flagged continuously, not once a year.
- HR stays in control. Drag-and-drop adjustments, override with reasoning, full version history.
- Ongoing compliance, not a project. New roles inherit the framework automatically — no re-engagement, no re-consulting.
Measurable outcomes
Why now
The EU Pay Transparency Directive enters force in June 2026. Employers with 100+ staff must report gender pay gaps, justify pay differences on objective criteria, and give every employee the right to ask for comparative pay data. Fines, litigation risk and reputational damage all scale with how defensible your job architecture is on day one. Starting a nine-month consulting project now already runs past the deadline — software-led grading is the only path that still fits.