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. The Council of Ministers approved the bill on 27 August 2026 and submitted it to the National Assembly on 11 September 2026, where it has been sent to committee ahead of a first reading. It is not in force, so the EU's 7 June 2026 transposition deadline has been missed. 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 bill, employers in Bulgaria will need to be open about pay from the very start of hiring and throughout employment. Job candidates must be given the basic salary or its range, plus any permanent supplements and relevant collective-agreement pay terms for the role, and employers may not ask candidates about their pay from current or previous employers. Job titles in adverts must be gender-neutral. Existing staff will gain the right to ask in writing 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, with an answer due within two months, and employers must remind staff of this right by 31 January each year. 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 bill follows them closely.

Under the bill as tabled, employers report information on the gender pay gap for the previous calendar year to the Commission for Protection against Discrimination by 7 June, after consulting trade unions or worker representatives: every year for employers with 250 or more workers, and every three years for those with 100 to 249. The reporting provisions take effect on 7 June 2027 for employers with 150 or more workers and on 7 June 2031 for those with 100 to 149. Smaller employers are not required to report, 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 category of workers, and the employer cannot justify it on objective, sex-neutral grounds and does not fix it within six months, the employer must carry out a joint pay assessment with worker or trade union representatives and take corrective action. These dates can still change in Parliament.