By Neil Guss Regional Employment Rights Manager &
James Tinston Employment Rights Lawyer
From 2026, large employers could be legally required to report on their ethnicity and disability pay gaps. The Government’s proposed Equality (Race and Disability) Bill sets out plans to make this mandatory, and a consultation on how it will work is now open until 10 June 2025.
Following the model already in place for gender pay gap reporting, the proposals would apply to employers with 250 or more staff and would require them to publish:
- The size of their ethnicity and disability pay gaps
- A breakdown of their workforce by ethnicity and disability
- The percentage of staff who chose not to disclose this information
To protect anonymity, employers would only need to report ethnicity pay gaps where at least 10 staff fall within a particular group. Where numbers are smaller, groups could be combined or reported in broader terms—such as White British versus all other ethnic minority employees.
Disability pay gap reporting would also use a simplified comparison between disabled and non-disabled staff, again only where there are at least 10 people in each group.
While this is a step toward more open workplace data, the system relies on staff being willing to share this information, and there’s currently no requirement for employers to take action based on what the data shows.
We encourage trade union members and reps to take part in the consultation and call for stronger legal duties—not just to report gaps, but to take meaningful steps to close them. Pay transparency matters, but it must lead to real change.
