Under European Union Directive (EU) 2023/970, member states must adopt legislation by June 2026 that strengthens transparency in pay setting, recruitment and career progression, while reinforcing the principle of equal pay for work of equal value. Greece is formally on track to transpose the Directive into national law, but its practical application in the public sector is emerging as a far more complex challenge.
The Directive introduces far-reaching obligations, including the disclosure of starting salaries or salary ranges in job advertisements, employees’ right to information about how pay and promotions are determined, and mechanisms to identify and correct unjustified wage disparities. In public administrations, this presupposes a clear and comparable salary framework across institutions, job categories and grades.
That clarity is undermined by the so-called “personal pay difference,” a transitional mechanism introduced during sweeping public-sector pay reforms following the financial crisis. As Greece overhauled its fragmented salary regimes and introduced unified pay scales after 2011, the state sought to avoid nominal wage cuts for serving employees. Where new pay scales produced lower salaries than the old system, the difference was frozen and preserved as a personal supplement, added on top of regular earnings.
Over time, this supposedly temporary measure became entrenched. Crucially, the personal pay difference is not linked to qualifications, performance, responsibilities or productivity. Instead, it reflects an employee’s historical pay position before reform. The result is that two civil servants with identical roles, seniority and grades may earn different total salaries solely because one carries a legacy supplement and the other does not.
From the perspective of pay transparency, the distortions are significant. Employees in the same professional category but working in different ministries may receive different pay simply because one previously served in a better-paid agency. Transfers within the public sector add another layer of complexity, as staff moving from public enterprises or entities with special pay regimes into central government retain their personal supplements, even when occupying identical posts.
The issue becomes particularly sensitive for new recruits. While job advertisements may comply with EU rules by stating salary ranges, newcomers may later discover that colleagues in the same position earn substantially more due to personal pay differences that are neither transparent nor objectively justified. Such discrepancies risk undermining confidence in the system and weakening the Directive’s core purpose.
Unless Greece restructures or gradually absorbs these legacy supplements into a unified and transparent pay framework, there is a growing risk that implementation of the EU rules will remain largely formal. In that scenario, the country would meet its legal obligations on paper while falling short of delivering genuine equal pay for work of equal value in practice.
