EUPTD Article 4: What "Job Group" Actually Means for Your Pay Structure

By Tomasz Rey, GRP CCP SPHRi  .  Pelayo Consultores  .  2026

Most HR teams preparing for EUPTD compliance assume they can use their existing grade structure as the basis for pay transparency reporting. The assumption is natural: they have grades, they can calculate averages, they are done. They are not done. Article 4 requires something different, and misreading it creates a compliance gap that shows up at exactly the wrong moment.

What Article 4 actually says

Article 4 of EUPTD 2023/970 requires employers to ensure that workers are assigned to job categories using job evaluation and job classification criteria that are common to men and women, and are gender-neutral.

The key phrase is gender-neutral criteria. This is not a statement about outcomes. It is a requirement about the process used to group jobs. If your current grade structure was built using criteria that correlate with gender-segregated roles, that structure does not satisfy Article 4, regardless of how many grades it has or how well-documented it is.

A grade structure built on market-pricing alone will not satisfy Article 4. Market rates reflect historical pay discrimination. Using them as the primary classification criterion imports that discrimination into your job groups.

The three criteria that survive scrutiny

The European Commission's guidance and the case law preceding EUPTD (particularly Rummler and Bilka) point to three types of criteria that consistently hold up under gender-neutrality review:

Notably absent: market rate, internal status, length of service, and personal performance. These are not classification criteria. They are pay-setting inputs that operate after job grouping is complete.

Why existing grade structures usually fail

Most European grade structures were built using one of three approaches: point-factor evaluation (where the factors were designed decades ago and have not been reviewed for gender-neutrality), market-anchored banding (where the primary grouping criterion is the market median), or managerial judgement (where "grade" reflects perceived seniority rather than evaluated job content).

All three produce grade structures that can group jobs incorrectly under Article 4. A senior care worker and a junior procurement analyst may sit in the same pay band under a market-anchored structure because their market rates coincide. But their roles have entirely different responsibility profiles, skill requirements, and effort demands. Grouping them together for pay transparency reporting produces a comparison that conceals rather than reveals pay inequity.

What a compliant job group looks like

A job group under Article 4 is a set of roles that perform work of equal value, assessed using gender-neutral criteria applied consistently. "Equal value" does not mean "identical work." It means that when the responsibility, skills, and effort of the roles are evaluated against the same framework, they score within a defined range of each other.

The Axiomera framework (R/S/E/WC, 1000-point scale) was designed with this requirement explicitly in mind. Roles within 80 points of each other on the total score are candidates for the same job group. Roles that diverge beyond 120 points are not, regardless of their market rate proximity.

This is not the only defensible approach, but it is one that produces a documented, traceable basis for grouping that can be presented to a works council or supervisory authority and withstand a gender-neutrality challenge.

The practical implication

If your EUPTD preparation started with your existing grade structure, you are not necessarily wrong, but you need to validate it. The question to ask is: what were the criteria used to place each role in its current grade, and are those criteria gender-neutral by the standard Article 4 applies?

If you cannot answer that question with documentation, your grade structure is an assertion, not a classification. Assertions do not survive Art. 10 reporting requirements or supervisory review.