Gender pay gap reporting in India
Reviewed by Mellow Editorial Team, HR & payroll content team
India has no mandatory gender pay gap reporting law yet, but that does not mean employers can ignore the issue. Equal remuneration obligations exist under statute, and regulators, investors and employees are paying closer attention to pay equity than ever before.
What the law actually requires
The Equal Remuneration Act, 1976 obligated employers to pay men and women equal remuneration for the same or similar work, and prohibited gender-based discrimination in recruitment and conditions of service. Under India's four consolidated Labour Codes, which came into force in 2025, these provisions have been absorbed into the Code on Wages. The core obligation remains: you cannot pay an employee less on the basis of gender where the work is the same or of a similar nature.
Beyond that baseline, there is currently no statute requiring employers to calculate, audit or publicly disclose a gender pay gap figure — nothing equivalent to the UK's Gender Pay Gap Reporting regulations or the EU Pay Transparency Directive. What exists instead is a patchwork of softer obligations.
SEBI's Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report (BRSR) framework, which applies to the top 1,000 listed companies by market capitalisation, asks firms to disclose median wages disaggregated by gender and category (permanent, contract, etc.). For listed companies, this is the closest thing to mandatory pay gap disclosure India currently has. Unlisted employers have no equivalent statutory disclosure requirement.
Why the absence of a mandate still leaves you exposed
Statutory silence does not equal commercial safety. There are several practical reasons to take pay equity seriously regardless of listing status.
Talent and retention: candidates increasingly ask about pay equity, particularly in technology, financial services and multinational environments. A company that cannot answer the question credibly loses ground in hiring.
Investor and ESG scrutiny: private equity, venture capital and institutional investors conducting due diligence now routinely ask for workforce demographic and pay data. If you cannot produce it, that is itself a red flag.
Legal risk: an individual employee who believes she is being paid less than a male colleague doing equivalent work can raise a complaint under the Code on Wages. You will need to demonstrate that any difference is based on legitimate factors — experience, performance, tenure — not gender. If your compensation data is messy or undocumented, that defence becomes harder to run.
Regulatory direction of travel: the BRSR requirements for listed companies, combined with growing international pressure on Indian conglomerates and their subsidiaries, suggest mandatory reporting is more likely than not within the next few years. Building the habit now is cheaper than retrofitting it under deadline pressure.
How to run a basic pay equity audit
You do not need a specialist consultant to do a first-pass audit. The logic is straightforward.
Start by collecting clean data: every employee's compensation (base salary, fixed allowances, variable pay treated separately), job level or band, function, tenure and gender. If you use grades or bands, map everyone to the right one.
Then run two analyses. First, a raw gap: the median salary of women versus men across the whole organisation. This is the headline number. Second, an adjusted gap: the difference after controlling for role, level, tenure and location. This tells you whether women and men doing the same job at the same level are paid differently.
A large raw gap with a small adjusted gap usually signals a representation problem — women are concentrated in lower-paid roles or levels. A meaningful adjusted gap is a direct pay equity problem and requires immediate attention. Both matter, but they point to different remedies.
Document what you find, including the reasons for any gaps you can legitimately explain. That documentation is your evidence if a complaint arises.
Fixing gaps you find
Where an adjusted gap exists, a phased correction plan is typically more practical than immediate across-the-board increases, particularly for smaller employers. Prioritise the largest individual outliers first.
For representation-driven gaps, the fix is slower: it involves promotion pipelines, return-to-work policies after parental leave, and ensuring that performance assessment criteria do not inadvertently disadvantage women taking on different types of projects or working patterns.
One practical step many employers miss: review your salary negotiation process. Research consistently shows that offers based on previous salary perpetuate historic gaps. Using structured salary bands and making the band visible to candidates removes one of the most common sources of new pay inequity entering your organisation.
Preparing for future disclosure requirements
If SEBI's BRSR framework is expanded or a standalone pay equity reporting requirement is introduced, listed companies and large private firms will need clean, auditable compensation data by gender and job family. The time to build that data infrastructure is not the year the regulation passes.
Keep compensation data in a system that allows you to filter and disaggregate by gender, level, function and employment type. Run the audit annually so you can demonstrate trend data, not just a snapshot. If you use a payroll platform like Mellow to manage cross-border teams, ensure that whoever manages Indian payroll is capturing these fields consistently.
The regulatory floor in India remains relatively low. The business and legal case for voluntary action is not.
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