UK gender pay gap reporting is a data exercise first and a communications exercise second. The six figures an employer publishes are calculated from payroll data for one pay period and one twelve-month window, using precise rules for what counts as pay, bonus and working hours. The arithmetic is simple. The difficulty is almost always in the inputs.
This guide is for HR, Finance and payroll teams that want to be ready well before the next snapshot date. It sets out who reports, what the six figures are, how the data is built, where Workday can help, and what is changing next. It is general information drawn from the Government Equalities Office statutory guidance, not legal advice, so have your final wording checked before you publish.
Who Must Report, and When
Any employer with 250 or more employees on its snapshot date must report. The snapshot date is 5 April for private, voluntary and most other employers, and 31 March for most public authorities. Employers must publish within a year of the snapshot date. For private sector employers, the next snapshot date is 5 April 2027.
The Six Figures You Publish
Every report contains the same six figures:
- The mean gender pay gap in hourly pay
- The median gender pay gap in hourly pay
- The mean gender pay gap in bonus pay
- The median gender pay gap in bonus pay
- The proportion of men and women who received bonus pay
- The proportion of men and women in each of four hourly pay quartiles
Gaps are expressed as a percentage of men’s pay. A positive figure means women have lower pay or bonuses than men, a negative figure means the reverse, and zero means parity. Figures can be reported as whole percentages or to one decimal place.
Relevant Employees and Full-Pay Relevant Employees
The guidance uses two employee lists, and mixing them up is a common source of error.
Relevant employees are everyone employed on the snapshot date with a contract of employment, including part-time staff, job-sharers and people on leave, plus certain self-employed workers who must perform the work personally. They are counted as individuals, not full-time equivalents. This list is used for the bonus calculations.
Full-pay relevant employees are the subset who were paid their usual full basic pay, including paid leave, in the pay period that contains the snapshot date, or who were paid less for reasons other than leave, such as irregular hours or a strike. Anyone paid less than usual because of leave, including statutory maternity pay or unpaid special leave, drops out of this list, although they stay in the relevant employees list. The hourly pay calculations and quartiles use only full-pay relevant employees.
Building Ordinary Pay
For each full-pay relevant employee, you need ordinary pay from the pay period that includes the snapshot date. That is the period in which you normally pay basic pay, such as a week, a fortnight or a month. Use gross pay after any salary sacrifice and before tax, National Insurance and employee pension contributions.
Ordinary pay includes basic pay, allowances, piecework, pay for leave and shift premium pay. Allowances count where they are part of regular pay or relate to core duties, such as location or car allowances.
It excludes overtime pay, allowances earned during paid overtime, redundancy and other termination pay, payments for untaken annual leave, repayment of authorised business expenses, and benefits in kind. Only earnings actually paid in that pay period count, so a correction for an earlier underpayment should not be included.
Building Bonus Pay
Bonus pay covers rewards relating to profit sharing, productivity, performance, incentive, commission and long service awards, and includes one-off, non-consolidated payments. It can be paid as cash, vouchers or securities.
Two different windows apply. For the bonus pay gap and the proportion receiving a bonus, you use all bonuses paid to every relevant employee in the 12 months ending on the snapshot date. For hourly pay, only bonuses paid within the pay period containing the snapshot date are added to ordinary pay, and a bonus relating to a longer period must be prorated, treating a month as 30.44 days or a year as 52.18 weeks.
Securities count only if they led to an income tax charge in the relevant period, and a long-term incentive that is earned but deferred is not counted until it is paid.
Weekly Hours and Hourly Pay
Hourly pay needs weekly working hours for each full-pay relevant employee. For regular hours, use the contractual hours in force on the last day of the pay period, excluding overtime. For variable hours, use the mean over the 12 weeks ending with the last full week of the pay period, again excluding overtime.
To turn pay into an hourly figure, add ordinary pay and any prorated bonus for the pay period, multiply by 7 divided by the number of days in the period, and divide by weekly hours. In GOV.UK’s worked example, £1,300 of pay and bonus over a 14-day period gives £650 a week, which over 40 hours is £16.25 an hour.
Where Workday Can Help
If you run Workday Payroll for the UK, there are delivered reports to start from. View UK and IRL Gender Pay Gap Hourly Rate of Pay displays average hourly and weekly pay on the snapshot date, and View UK and IRL Gender Bonus Gap Reporting displays total bonus paid in the 12 months before it, including retro bonus payments. The snapshot date is set through the Maintain UK and IRL Company Gender Pay Gap Snapshot Date task.
The reports depend on earnings being mapped to the right pay component groups. Workday’s troubleshooting guidance covers earnings that do not appear in the correct report, and points to the gender pay gap and bonus pay component groups on each earning. A wrongly grouped earning quietly misstates pay or bonus.
If payroll runs outside Workday, or you use Workday only for HCM and Compensation, the reports will not hold your payroll earnings. Decide in advance which system is the source of truth for pay, bonus and hours.
What Is Changing Next
Three developments are worth planning for.
Recording sex. The GOV.UK guidance was updated on 21 May 2026 following the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of sex in the Equality Act 2010. It now asks employers to record employees’ sex, and sets out how to handle employees with a Gender Recognition Certificate, including confidentiality. Read the current guidance and take legal advice.
Equality action plans. Employers with 250 or more employees can publish an equality action plan voluntarily from April 2026, covering action on the gender pay gap and support for employees experiencing menopause. Under the Employment Rights Act 2025 this is expected to become mandatory from spring 2027, subject to regulations, with the first compulsory plans likely due by April 2028.
Ethnicity and disability. In March 2026 the government confirmed it will legislate for mandatory ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting for employers with 250 or more employees, using the same six measures plus workforce composition and action plans. The legislation has not yet been enacted, so timing is unconfirmed.
If you also employ people in the EU, the Pay Transparency Directive brings first reports from June 2027 for employers with 150 or more workers, though national transposition is uneven.
Pre-Snapshot Checklist
Use this before your next snapshot date.
- Confirm your snapshot date and the pay period that contains it
- Separate the relevant employees and full-pay relevant employees lists
- Check ordinary pay inclusions and exclusions against the guidance, including allowances
- Confirm bonus data for the 12 months to the snapshot date, and prorating for hourly pay
- Verify contractual and variable hours, excluding overtime
- Check how sex is recorded and who can access it
- Confirm earnings are mapped to the correct Workday pay component groups, if you use Workday Payroll
- Agree the source of truth if payroll sits outside Workday
- Review draft wording with legal advisers before publication
Get a Second Set of Eyes
If you would like a second set of eyes on the data behind your reporting, this October we are opening ten free deep technical diagnoses of Workday Compensation setups for organisations six to thirty-six months post go-live. Our specialists review your plans, eligibility rules, approvals and statements, and hand back a clear, prioritised list of what to fix before your next cycle opens.
First ten organisations only. Closes 20 October.
DM us on LinkedIn to book your diagnosis. For the wider picture, read The Complete Guide to Workday Advanced Compensation.