Equal Pay Audits: How to Conduct One

An equal pay audit compares the pay of employees doing equal work or work of equal value, and looks for gender (or other protected characteristic) pay gaps that cannot be explained by legitimate factors such as seniority, skill, or performance. Equal pay is a legal right under the Equality Act 2010 — not just a metric to report.

The audit starts with job evaluation: grouping roles by work of equal value. It then compares pay across gender (and ideally ethnicity and disability, though those are not yet statutory requirements for reporting). Where gaps exist, the audit looks for explanations. An unexplained gap is a liability — a potential equal pay claim that starts from the date the underpayment began, with no limitation period until the employment ends.

Mellow's pay equity analysis module runs this comparison automatically across your workforce data. It surfaces unexplained gaps, models the cost of closing them, and generates a report suitable for sharing with senior leadership or including in an ERA 2025 equality action plan. The analysis is only as good as the data in Mellow — consistent job levelling and pay data entry matters. But starting with messy data is better than not starting at all.