Pay transparency rules in Bulgaria

On 19 May 2026 Bulgaria's Ministry of Labour and Social Policy published a draft Act amending the Protection Against Discrimination Act (Закон за защита от дискриминация) to bring in the Directive. It went to public consultation on the government portal strategy.bg, which closed on 18 June 2026. As of 30 June 2026 the bill had not been adopted by Parliament and is not in force, so the EU's 7 June 2026 transposition deadline has been missed. This means there is no settled Bulgarian pay transparency law yet. The Directive itself does not apply directly to most private employers, so until the national bill passes, the specific Bulgarian duties below are proposed, not binding. Once the law is passed it is expected to apply to all employers in Bulgaria, with larger employers carrying extra reporting duties.

Under the draft, employers in Bulgaria will need to be open about pay from the very start of hiring and throughout employment. Job candidates should be told the starting pay or pay range before or during the interview stage, so they are not negotiating blind. Existing staff will gain the right to ask for information about their own pay and the average pay, broken down by sex, for colleagues doing the same work or work of equal value. Employers will need clear, sex-neutral criteria for setting pay and judging the value of a role. Larger employers will also have to calculate and report their gender pay gap to the authorities. These are the core building blocks the Directive requires across the EU; the Bulgarian draft follows them closely.

The draft follows the Directive's phased thresholds. Employers with 150 or more workers are expected to report first, from 2027. Employers with 100 to 149 workers join later, from 2031. Smaller employers are not required to report under the draft, though they still face the transparency and information duties. The headline trigger to watch is the joint pay assessment: if reporting shows an average gender pay gap of at least 5% in any group of workers doing equal work, and the employer cannot justify it on objective, sex-neutral grounds and does not fix it, the employer must carry out a joint pay assessment with worker or trade union representatives, working with the equality body, and take corrective action. Exact reporting frequency and first-report dates will be confirmed when the law is passed.

When you employ someone in Bulgaria through Teamed, Teamed is the Employer of Record, meaning Teamed is the legal employer on paper and on the Bulgarian payroll. That matters here because the pay transparency duties sit with the legal employer. So obligations such as giving candidates pay information, answering staff pay-information requests, keeping sex-neutral pay criteria, and any gender pay gap reporting fall to Teamed for your Bulgarian worker, not to your own company directly. In practice we work with you: you set the commercial pay level, and we make sure it is documented and communicated in line with whatever the final Bulgarian law requires. Because the law is still a draft, we are tracking it closely and will tell you what, if anything, you need to change once it is passed and the commencement dates are confirmed.