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Equal pay recalibrated: Federal Labour Court removes median and group hurdles
The Federal Labour Court has made clear that, to trigger the presumption of sex-based pay discrimination, it is sufficient to compare oneself with a single, better-paid colleague of the opposite sex performing the same or work of equal value. Additional hurdles such as a "preponderant probability" of discrimination, the size of the comparator group or median pay levels are irrelevant for the presumption to arise. The case has been remitted to the Regional Labour Court to examine whether the employer can rebut the presumption with objective, sex-neutral reasons.
Facts
The proceedings concern a long-serving head of department at Daimler Trucks who, after returning from parental leave, discovered that she was paid significantly less than male colleagues in comparable roles. She relied, among other things, on information from an internal pay transparency dashboard that displays median values for defined comparator groups by sex, and she identified a specific, higher-paid male colleague as her comparator. The Regional Labour Court in Stuttgart awarded her approximately EUR 130,000 in compensation for four years, but anchored the award in the median pay of male department heads and denied a claim to full alignment with the particularly well-remunerated comparator. The claimant, supported by the Society for Civil Rights (GFF), appealed to the Federal Labour Court against this limitation.
Decision of the Federal Labour Court (judgment of 23 October 2025 – 8 AZR 300/24)
The Federal Labour Court maintained its established approach while emphasising the binding requirements of European law. For bringing a claim, it is sufficient to identify a male comparator who performs the same or work of equal value and is paid more. Where this is established, a presumption of discrimination arises, and the burden of proof shifts to the employer to demonstrate that objective, sex-neutral reasons justify the differential treatment. The Regional Labour Court's interim reliance on median values as a benchmark for the quantum of the claim is therefore misplaced: if the employer cannot rebut the presumption, the claimant is entitled to the same pay as the specifically identified comparator, not merely to the male group's median. At the same time, the Federal Labour Court remitted the case to the Regional Labour Court. There, the employer will have the opportunity to provide concrete reasons for the pay differentials, and the claimant may supplement her submissions – for example, regarding the comparability of equity-based remuneration components that she had previously linked to an anonymously identified, exceptionally highly remunerated "super colleague" at her leadership level. The presiding judge underscored that the opacity of a pay system does not preclude the subsequent provision of reasons; however, the lower court must examine whether any reasons advanced are capable of rebutting the presumption.
Assessment and practical implications
This decision foregrounds the EU-law presumption mechanism and shifts the focus away from statistical aggregates such as medians to the concrete single comparator. In practice, it reinforces the enforcement of equal pay: identifying a better-paid comparator of the opposite sex performing the same or work of equal value is enough to trigger the presumption of sex discrimination; the employer must then counter it with objective, sex-neutral criteria. For employees, the single-comparator route becomes a more effective gateway to litigation. For employers, the ruling heightens the need to substantiate and evidence pay decisions with clear, transparent and defensible rationale; generalised references to "performance" will typically be insufficient. The lower court's analysis will therefore centre less on the threshold for the presumption and more on whether the employer can meaningfully rebut it. As a result, the emphasis moves away from complex debates about medians and group sizes towards assessing whether the specific pay differential can be objectively justified on non-sex grounds.
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