Employment Guide -- Updated July 2026
Gender Pay Gap Reporting Guide 2026/27
Large UK employers must publish gender pay gap figures every year, but the numbers are widely misunderstood. This guide explains what employers have to report, how the mean and median gap differ, and why a gender pay gap is not the same thing as unequal pay for the same job.
Who Must Report
Private and voluntary sector employers in Great Britain with 250 or more employees on a specific annual "snapshot date" are legally required to calculate and publish their gender pay gap figures, with a broadly parallel set of duties applying to many public sector employers. Employers with fewer than 250 employees fall outside the mandatory duty, though a growing number choose to publish voluntarily as part of wider transparency or ESG reporting commitments.
What Has to Be Published
Covered employers must publish six figures each reporting year: the mean and median gender pay gap in ordinary hourly pay, the mean and median gender bonus gap, the proportion of male and female employees who received a bonus in the relevant period, and the proportion of men and women in each of four equally sized pay quartiles (from lowest to highest paid) across the whole organisation. Many employers also publish a voluntary narrative statement explaining the drivers behind their figures and any action plan to reduce the gap.
Mean vs Median Gap
The mean gender pay gap compares the average hourly pay of all men against all women in the organisation, which can be pulled significantly by a small number of very high earners at either end. The median gap instead compares the middle-ranked man's pay against the middle-ranked woman's pay when each group is separately ordered from lowest to highest, making it less sensitive to a handful of outlier salaries and often regarded as a more representative single snapshot of typical pay differences across the workforce.
Gender Pay Gap vs Equal Pay
This distinction causes the most confusion. Equal pay is a specific legal right under the Equality Act 2010: a man and a woman doing the same job, work rated as equivalent, or work of equal value must be paid the same, and paying them differently for that reason is unlawful sex discrimination. The gender pay gap is a different, organisation-wide statistical measure that captures the average pay difference across an entire workforce -- most commonly driven by more men occupying senior, higher-paid roles, differing rates of part-time work, or industry workforce composition, rather than by unequal pay for the same role. An organisation can have a large gender pay gap with no unlawful equal pay breach at all, and vice versa, so the two issues need to be assessed separately.
How to Check and Use the Data
Reported gender pay gap figures for any covered employer are published on the government's gender pay gap service website and can be searched by employer name, showing the figures and any narrative statement for each reporting year. Employees, job applicants and researchers can use the figures to compare organisations, track an employer's trend over time, and ask informed questions during recruitment or performance reviews, while bearing in mind the mean/median and equal-pay caveats above when interpreting any single year's numbers.