Portugal's Pay Transparency Bill Leaves Salaries Out of Job Adverts, and the UGT Says That Guts the Point

Portugal is about to write the European Union's pay transparency rules into its labour law, and the question that matters most to anyone who has ever answered a job advert has quietly been settled in employers' favour. The government's draft bill, circulated to the social partners this month, will not require companies to publish a salary or a salary band in the advert itself. On Friday the UGT (General Workers' Union) told the government that this is not good enough.

In the formal opinion it sent to ministers, the union led by Mário Mourão said the pay figure should appear "preferably" in the job advert and, failing that, at a moment "necessarily prior to the first interview or, at the very least, to the start of negotiation of pay conditions". The government's text says something much looser: candidates have a right to be told the starting pay or its range "at a moment before the date the employment contract is signed".

What the directive allowed, and what Lisbon chose

Directive (EU) 2023/970 gives applicants a right to know the initial pay or pay range for the job, set "on the basis of objective, gender-neutral criteria". It then lists ways an employer might deliver that: in the published vacancy notice, before the interview, or otherwise. That "or" is the whole story. Brussels' own explanatory material told workers to expect the number "either in the job advert or before the interview". Portugal has taken the third option and stretched it to its outer limit.

The practical effect is that a candidate can be shortlisted, sit through several rounds, negotiate and receive an offer, all before the employer is obliged to state a range. By then the information has lost most of its power: the point of pre-contractual transparency is to change how a negotiation opens, not to confirm the outcome after it closes.

Portugal missed the directive's 7 June 2026 transposition deadline and the European Commission opened an infringement procedure the following day. Our earlier coverage of the missed deadline and the draft left sitting at the Ministry of Labour set out how the file drifted. The bill now in consultation is the answer to that infringement, which means it is being written under time pressure.

What the union accepts, and where it pushes

The UGT's opinion is not a rejection. It calls the transposition urgent and describes several government choices as positive: stronger information rights, a ban on asking candidates about their pay history, the abolition of pay-secrecy clauses, and the extension of reporting duties to companies with 50 or more workers. That last point goes beyond the directive's floor, which only obliges Member States to catch employers from 100 upward on a staggered timetable.

Beyond the advert question, the union wants the definitions of "equal work" and "work of equal value" tightened, because those concepts decide which employees are compared and therefore whether a gap shows up at all. It also wants the reversal of the burden of proof in pay discrimination cases written more firmly. Separately, the CGTP demanded this week that the ACT (Authority for Working Conditions) be reinforced before the new duties bite, on the reasonable ground that a right nobody inspects is a right nobody enforces. The inspectorate was already stretched when it notified 200,000 employers of their heat-protection duties in July.

A transposition shaped by the last labour fight

The cautious drafting reads less like an accident than like a government that has already lost one labour battle this year. The broader 'Trabalho XXI' overhaul died in parliament in early July, and ministers have little appetite for a second confrontation with employer confederations over a file Brussels is already prosecuting, having also seen the Labour Code overhaul collapse when Chega withdrew support. The cost is a transparency law that is transparent late, in a market where one recent survey put the share of workers wanting pay bands in adverts at 87%, and where pay grew 5.1% in the second quarter but inflation left workers only 1.8% better off.

What This Means for Expats

• Job hunting: Do not expect salary bands to start appearing in Portuguese job adverts. Ask for a number before the first interview and treat a refusal as information in itself.
• Your salary history becomes off-limits: Once in force, an employer may not ask what you currently earn or earned previously. If you are moving from a lower-cost country, that removes a common anchor for a lower offer.
• Pay-secrecy clauses lose their teeth: Contract terms barring you from discussing pay with colleagues will no longer stand, which matters most in small international teams.
• Company size is the trigger: At 50 or more employees in Portugal, expect gender pay-gap reporting. Below that, the duties are far lighter.
• Timing: The bill is still in consultation and then has to clear parliament. Nothing changes this year, and the final text may not match the draft.