What to Do After a Pay Equity Audit

Your pay equity audit is complete and you’re ready to give yourself and your team a giant pat on the back for taking strides towards closing your pay gaps. (Bravo if you’ve sealed those gaps tight already!) 

But guess what? Pay equity is not a one-off clean up; it’s a system you have to maintain, meaning that now is not the time to rest on your laurels. 

Unfortunately, this is a common trap companies fall into. SHRM reports that 61% of HR leaders conduct audits to identify pay inequities — which sounds great, until you realise that only 54% of them review pay annually. This is proof that too many organisations treat audits as a destination, not a starting line. They close the gap once, tick the compliance box, and move on — wholly unaware that those same gaps will edge open again.

At a global level, each of these creeping inequalities add up. Women still earn just 77 cents for every dollar men receive. At the current pace of progress, it’ll take around 70 years to close the global pay gap. That’s nearly three generations, and a reminder that achieving equity once doesn’t guarantee keeping it. 

Pay equity should be a continuous process. So, the real question isn’t “Have you run your pay equity audit?” It’s “What will you do next to keep up your commitment to fair and equal pay?”

A 5-step post-audit checklist to commit to fair pay

Here are five practical steps you can take to make fair pay a living principle in your organisation. 

Step 1: Act quickly on what you find 

When your audit reveals pay gaps, take visible, early action to reinforce trust amongst your workers and prevent inequities from compounding. 

Warning: If you’re operating in the EU, the timeline is especially important. Under EU rules, if you report average pay gaps of 5% or more, you have six months to fix them, or face a joint pay assessment with employee representatives.

Here’s what to focus on first:

☑ Make immediate pay adjustments: Correct salaries for employees who are clearly below peers in comparable roles. Prioritise fixes with the biggest impact, such as closing gender or role-based gaps within teams.
☑ Address compliance obligations: Map your audit results against local or EU reporting requirements and act on any that carry specific deadlines or remediation rules.
☑ Document every change: Record the rationale behind each salary correction and link it to your equity audit findings, so you can demonstrate fairness and consistency later. 
☑ Feed updates into your longer-term plan: Log every adjustment so it becomes part of your equity tracking rather than a standalone fix forgotten by the next cycle. 

Step 2: Build a longer-term remediation plan 

70% of organisations claim to be taking action on pay equity, according to a World at Work report. But if you’ve doubled down on short-term fixes in step 1, and don’t have anything left in the tank, you can’t expect your results to be long-lasting. Instead, create a remediation plan that incorporates some of the following longer-term plays: 

☑ Create a dedicated equity reserve: Set aside a fixed portion of your annual compensation budget specifically for equity corrections, so you always have access to available funds if you need to make any adjustments. 
☑ Add fairness checkpoints to pay decisions: Before any salary change, whether a new hire, promotion, or counteroffer, run a quick internal comparison of how peers are paid in similar roles. You’ll find it easier to catch disparities before they’re locked in, and avoid any costly retroactive fixes later. 
☑ Link remediation to promotion outcomes: Review pay progression by gender or demographic after each promotion cycle to confirm these raises align well with relevant responsibilities. 
☑ Expand the lens beyond base pay: Tracking base salary alone can mask inequities that appear in other reward elements. A well-developed remediation plan covers total compensation, including benefits, bonuses, stock options, and allowances. 

Step 3: Embed equity into governance 

Let’s say your audit has resulted in you closing the pay gaps in your organisation — gender, racial, and even disability. The next challenge is preventing regression. Pay gaps reopen through everyday decisions, such as a counteroffer here, a promotion there, or a new hire coming in above the band. 

Your best bet is to clearly define how pay equity governance keeps your system honest over the long term, with rules, roles, and routines that keep pay decisions accountable. Here’s how: 

☑ Set formal decision rules: Every pay-related action, from hiring to off-cycle adjustments, should trigger a defined check for equity impact. You might require an internal comparison before approving any offer or out-of-cycle raise that falls outside the midpoint range.
☑ Build fairness gates into workflows: Hard-coding equity checkpoints into your pay review and promotion systems means they can’t be skipped. You could set up automated prompts or approval steps in your HRIS that flag when a proposed change would worsen the gap.
☑ Assign clear ownership: Fairness doesn’t belong to “HR in general.” To keep accountability active beyond audit season, get specific by assigning explicit owners. For example, your Comp & Ben team, People partners, or a DEI task group could monitor equity data, report progress, and oversee exceptions. 
☑ Make governance a calendar item: Schedule quarterly or biannual equity reviews alongside other comp governance activities, like band updates, budget setting, or performance calibration. 

Step 4: Track, test, and adjust 

Even with strong governance, pay equity isn’t something you can “set and forget.” Every hiring round, promotion, or market change reshapes your pay landscape, and those shifts need constant attention. Here’s how to keep on top of the ebbs and flows of pay: 

☑ Move from static to continuous monitoring: Replace the annual audit with lighter, more frequent reviews. A quarterly equity pulse on fast-moving teams helps you spot issues before they solidify.
☑ Prioritise patterns over numbers: Track pay progression, promotion speed, and offer rates by demographic to understand how inequities form, more than where they show up. 
☑ Watch pay changes: Monitor who’s getting increases, when, and by how much. While pay levels give you structure, movement data reveals emerging bias faster than once-a-year snapshots.
☑ Close the loop on hiring and off-cycles: Run checks on every new offer and out-of-cycle adjustment to make sure you’re not reintroducing gaps you’ve already fixed.
☑ Automate alerts where possible: Use tools that flag when pay data starts to drift from target ranges. Automation keeps equity tracking active, even when your budgets and priorities shift. 

Step 5: Communicate fairness 

You can check all the boxes and perfectly balance your spreadsheets. But the thing about pay equity is you’ll still lose trust if employees don’t understand how you decided their comp.

In fact, respondents to WTW’s 2025 Pay Transparency Progress Report found that the two biggest barriers to advancing transparency are employee reactions (53%) and managers’ ability to explain compensation programmes (50%). These were streets ahead of more mainstream concerns like pay programmes not being ready (35%) and being undecided about pay transparency ambition (33%.)

In other words, your post-audit communication skills could mean make or break for your pay equity approach. Here’s how to get them right. 

☑ Equip your managers first: Fairness falls flat when managers can’t confidently explain the intent behind pay decisions. Train them to discuss salary ranges, progression criteria, and equity adjustments in simple, evidence-based language. 
☑ Lead with principles, not percentages: Sharing raw data can confuse or overwhelm. Instead, articulate the “why” behind your compensation philosophy — how you define fairness, how you measure it, and how decisions are made. 
☑ Share progress, not perfection: Communicating fairness doesn’t necessarily mean publishing every detail. If you’re not ready for full transparency, start with milestones; for example, “We’ve reduced our gender pay gap by 4% in the last year.” Small, visible wins prove action and make ongoing improvement part of the story.
☑ Build transparency into your cultural rhythm: Don’t wait for policy changes or legislation to force a disclosure. Make pay communication part of your annual cycle — a recurring update that normalises openness rather than turning it into a one-off event.

Operationalise fair pay with Figures

If you’re already running regular pay equity audits, you’re already taking an important step in the right direction — one that 4 in 10 organisations have yet to take, according to SHRM. But it’s what you do with your audit findings that truly shapes your ability to build a compensation system where fairness can thrive.  

That’s where Figures comes in. Our compensation management platform helps HR and Reward leaders turn audit insights into continuous action. 

With Figures, you can:

☑ Monitor pay equity in real time using live benchmarking data and automated alerts that flag when pay drifts from your target ranges.
☑ Standardise decision-making by building clear, repeatable workflows that apply consistent rules across every pay review, promotion, or offer.
☑ Strengthen trust and transparency through data-backed insights that help managers explain pay decisions confidently and fairly.

The result is a pay system that’s dynamic, defensible, and designed for lasting fairness.

Ready to turn pay equity from a point-in-time achievement into an ongoing practice? Book a free Figures platform demo today to learn how.