Is job evaluation required by law in Chile?

What Chile's law covers — and what it doesn't

Chile legislated equal pay in 2009, when Ley 20.348 inserted Article 62 bis into the Código del Trabajo: employers must observe the principle of equal remuneration between men and women performing the same work (un mismo trabajo). Pay differences remain lawful where grounded in objective factors — the provision itself names ability, qualifications, suitability, responsibility, and productivity — and employers above size thresholds must maintain an internal procedure for pay-equality complaints, with claims escalable to the labor courts.

The limiting phrase is un mismo trabajo. Chilean law compares the same job only — it contains no equal-value standard, no authority to compare a female-dominated role with a different male-dominated role of equivalent demands, and therefore no job evaluation requirement of any kind. Chile ratified ILO Convention 100 in 1971, whose equal-value principle is precisely the broader comparison; domestic law has not closed that distance, and the ILO's supervisory bodies have noted the restrictive scope.

Who must comply

Article 62 bis binds all employers, with the internal claims procedure required of larger workplaces and judicial recourse beyond it. The practical exposure is narrow by design: where job titles separate the sexes, the same-work standard rarely engages — which is why, fifteen years on, the provision is more often discussed as a symbolic milestone than litigated as a remedy.

The compliance-gap story

Chile's provision shows the ceiling of objective-justification drafting inside a same-work frame: the statute's list of legitimate pay differentiators (qualifications, responsibility, productivity) resembles compensable-factor language, but those factors only ever justify differences within a job — they are never used to equate different jobs. For multinationals, Chilean operations sit in the same posture as Japan, India, and Mexico: locally compliant pay structures that would not survive an equal-value audit under the EU Directive, Canadian law, or group pay equity standards. Regional momentum — Brazil's enforced transparency regime next door — suggests the gap will attract legislative attention.

How point-factor job evaluation helps — even without a mandate

• Seeing what the statute can't — factor-based evaluation values unlike jobs on one scale, surfacing cross-occupational gaps that un mismo trabajo comparisons never reach — the gaps most likely to embarrass when transparency arrives.
• Sharper objective justifications — even within Article 62 bis, the lawful differentiators (responsibility, qualifications, productivity) are stronger evidence when documented through scored evaluation than asserted after a complaint.
• One standard across Latin America — employers operating in Brazil's report-and-remediate regime and Chile's same-work regime can run a single analytical methodology that satisfies the stricter and future-proofs the lighter.

Chile's law guarantees equal pay where men and women already do the same job. The structural question — whether the jobs they separately do are equally valued — is the one analytical employers answer for themselves.

The law

Official tools and downloads for Chile

Government-published job evaluation tools, guides, and templates — each links directly to the official source.

Frequently asked questions

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