23 March 2026
At its core, Gender Pay Gap (GPG) reporting is about transparency. It was introduced in 2017 and is a legal requirement for UK companies with 250 or more employees to measure and publish the difference in average pay between men and women in their workforce annually.
Understanding what data and which employees should be included in the report can be a complex process and it is critical to get it right – missing the deadline or reporting inaccurate figures can negatively impact an employer’s reputation.
The process starts with what is called a ‘snapshot date’. Most public authority employers should use 31 March and all other employers should use 5 April. The pay period that includes the snapshot date forms the basis for the calculations.
The reporting deadline is 4 April each year following the ‘snapshot date’ for private sector businesses, Different dates apply to public sector employers, who must report by 30 March every year.
Your ‘headcount’ is of the number of individual employees you have, not full-time equivalents. Individuals who are not relevant employees should not be included in the GPG calculation and should not form part of the 250-employee threshold which determines whether you have a mandatory obligation to report.
More information on who to include in the ‘headcount’ can be found here.
Employers must publish six calculations in the report:
- Mean gender pay gap in hourly pay
- Median gender pay gap in hourly pay
- Mean gender bonus gap
- Median gender bonus gap
- Proportion of men and women receiving a bonus
- Proportion of men and women in each pay quartile.
Remember mean and median? Those math statistics your teacher insisted would be useful one day – today is that day.
- The mean is the average – you add everything together and divide by the number of people
- The median is the middle value when all pay rates are lined up from lowest to highest.
These calculations are central to determining the average hourly rates for both genders.
In order to work out these calculations, you must first gather payroll data. Use your list of relevant employees from your head count to create another list of full-pay relevant employees.
Keep these two lists separate as ‘relevant employees’ are used to work out any gender pay gap in bonus pay and ‘full-pay relevant employees’ are used for all other gender pay gap calculations. Steps to prepare your data can be found here.
Your GPG report must be submitted online at the Government’s gender pay reporting website. It must also remain available on your organisation’s website for a minimum of three years. You can also publish the optional ‘narrative’ that will explain the reasons behind any gender pay gap and what steps you are taking to address it.
So, while gender pay gap reporting may involve a little number crunching and a brief reunion with maths statistics from your school days, it ultimately serves a bigger purpose: helping organisations better understand their workforce and work towards greater equality.
Information provided in this news article may be subject to change. Please make note of the date of publication to ensure that you are viewing up to date information.
