Pay transparency is reshaping how companies across the EU manage and communicate compensation. Driven by the EU Pay Transparency Directive, employers are moving from pay kept behind closed doors toward clear, defensible and openly explainable salary practices, including sharing pay ranges with candidates, giving employees the right to information about pay levels, and reporting on gender pay gaps. For growing companies in the Baltics and wider EU, this is more than a compliance exercise: it’s a shift that exposes any inconsistency in how people are paid. Organisations with well-structured, objective compensation systems will find transparency straightforward; those relying on ad-hoc or negotiated pay may discover gaps that are hard to justify. This page explains what pay transparency means in practice, what the rules require, and the concrete steps HR teams, founders and finance leaders can take now from auditing current pay and closing unexplained gaps to building fair, criteria-based salary structures to stay compliant and turn transparency into a competitive advantage in attracting and keeping talent.