Is job evaluation required by law in France?

What France's law requires

France carries one of Europe's older equal-value standards: the Code du travail has long required "à travail de valeur égale, salaire égal" — equal pay for work of equal value — enforceable by any employee against any employer. What French law has never done is prescribe how equal value is established. No statute names compensable factors, and no official factor-based tool exists.

What France built instead is the Index de l'égalité professionnelle (2019): a mandatory annual self-score out of 100, computed from five statistical indicators — the adjusted gender pay gap, the distribution of raises and promotions, pay raises after maternity leave, and the gender mix of the ten highest earners. Employers below threshold scores must adopt corrective measures, and persistent failure carries financial penalties of up to 1% of payroll. The Index made French pay gaps public and comparable — but it is an indicator calculator, not job evaluation: it compares pay within like-for-like categories and never asks whether differently-labelled jobs are of equal value.

Who must comply

• All employers — bound by the equal-value principle in the Code du travail; claims run through the conseils de prud'hommes and the Cour de cassation's equal-value case law.
• Employers with 50+ employees — must compute and publish the Index annually, with corrective obligations below the threshold score.

Enforcement and recent developments

The live story is the EU Pay Transparency Directive. France published a transposition draft in March 2026 but missed the 7 June 2026 deadline. The Directive will force the analytical question the Index avoids: gender pay gap reporting by category of workers performing work of equal value, assessed on skills, effort, responsibility, and working conditions — and the Index itself is slated for reform to align with that equal-value logic. French employers should expect the comfortable five-indicator regime to give way to category-based reporting that presupposes structured job evaluation.

How point-factor job evaluation supports compliance

France's gap between principle and method is exactly where analytical job evaluation fits:

• From Index to equal value — the Directive's category-based reporting needs defensible equal-value groupings the Index never required. A point-factor evaluation builds them on the Directive's four criteria before the French wrapper makes them mandatory.
• Equal-value claims — French courts compare jobs on knowledge, responsibility, and demands when claims arise. Employers with documented factor scores answer with analysis rather than job titles.
• No official tool to lean on — unlike Spain, France publishes no national evaluation instrument; the EIGE toolkit is the EU's recommended stand-in, and employers wanting more than a starter spreadsheet need their own methodology.

France made pay gaps visible in 2019. The next phase — explaining them by job value — is the one to prepare for now.

The law

Official tools and downloads for France

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

Frequently asked questions

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