Equal Pay Claims Are Rising: Why Every Employer Needs to Act Now

Equal pay has been front-page news this week — and not for the first time this year. On 7 September 2026, the Employment Appeal Tribunal handed down a major ruling in the long-running Next equal pay case, one of several high-profile cases moving through UK courts in 2026 involving household-name employers. Whatever the outcome of any single case, the pattern is unmistakable: equal pay claims are growing, they’re expensive, and they can affect any employer — not just retail giants.

This guide explains what equal pay actually means, what’s happening in the courts right now, and what you should be doing about it.

A quick explainer of the terms you’ll see

Equal pay — the legal principle, under the Equality Act 2010, that men and women doing equal work must receive equal pay. “Equal work” doesn’t have to mean the same job — it can also mean different jobs that are of equal value.
Work of equal value — one of the legal routes to an equal pay claim, where two different-looking jobs are shown to involve comparable demands — for example, comparable effort, skill, or decision-making — even though they don’t look alike on the surface.
Job evaluation — a structured process for comparing different roles against consistent factors, used to work out whether roles that look different are actually of equal value.
Justification defence — an employer’s argument that a pay difference, even where roles are of equal value, is due to a genuine factor unrelated to sex — for example, a market pay premium needed to recruit for a specific role.
Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) — the court that hears appeals from Employment Tribunal decisions.

What’s actually happening in the courts right now

Three cases making headlines in 2026 show just how varied — and how live — equal pay risk has become:

Next. Over 3,500 shop floor staff, predominantly women, argued they should be paid the same basic rate as warehouse operatives, a role with a more even gender split, for work found to be of equal value. An Employment Tribunal agreed in 2024, in a ruling that could have cost Next up to £30 million in back pay, with the total number of claimants across the wider litigation now exceeding 6,000. On appeal, the EAT ruled on 7 September 2026 that Next’s higher warehouse pay was actually justified — driven by genuine recruitment and retention pressures in that labour market, not sex. The case is expected to be appealed further, and supermarkets facing similar multibillion-pound claims are watching closely.

Co-op. A former group HR director was awarded over £101,000 after an employment tribunal upheld combined claims of unfair dismissal, equal pay, and sex discrimination — a decade after she’d left the business. An independent assessment had found her role sat at the same level as, or above, comparable male executives, yet her salary and performance ratings were lower. The case is a clear reminder that pay and appraisal decisions can resurface as evidence years later.

Tesco. The Court of Appeal ruled against Tesco in an equal pay dispute, addressing a practical question that matters well beyond retail: whether employees must individually document every detail of highly structured jobs, or whether standardised, centrally-dictated work processes can be relied on instead. The judgment favours a more practical approach for employers who’ve already standardised how work is carried out.

What these cases actually tell employers

The details differ, but the underlying lesson is the same across all three: pay differences between roles need a genuine, defensible reason — and that reason needs to be documented, not just assumed.

Next shows that a pay difference can survive legal challenge — but only where the employer can show a specific, evidenced business reason, not simply “that’s the market rate” asserted after the fact.
Co-op shows that equal pay risk doesn’t disappear over time — claims and evidence can resurface years after decisions were made, especially where dismissal and discrimination claims run alongside them.
Tesco shows that how work is actually structured and documented across your business directly affects how equal pay disputes are decided.

None of these employers are outliers because of their size or sector — they’re outliers because their pay practices were tested and made public. The same underlying risk sits quietly in businesses of every size, wherever pay differences between roles haven’t been properly examined and justified.

Why this isn’t just a big-employer problem

It’s tempting to read these headlines and assume equal pay risk scales with company size. It doesn’t, for a few reasons:

An equal pay claim doesn’t need a whole workforce to be affected. A single employee who believes they’re paid less than a colleague of the opposite sex doing equal work — or work of equal value — can bring a claim on their own.
“We’ve always paid it this way” is not a legal defence, at any size of business. If a pay difference can’t be objectively justified by a genuine factor unrelated to sex, it’s a real risk.
Every business has role patterns that can create risk without anyone intending it — roles that skew toward one gender, informally negotiated starting salaries, or pay that’s crept apart over years of individual decisions rather than any deliberate structure.
Smaller businesses often have less documentation to fall back on than a large employer with formal grading structures — which, as the Tesco case shows, can actually work against you if a dispute arises.

How job evaluation helps

Job evaluation is a structured way of answering the question these cases all turn on: is what we pay people actually justified by the work they do?

Defining consistent factors — such as responsibility, decision-making, skill, and working conditions — used to assess every role the same way.
Scoring roles against those factors, rather than against each other directly, reducing the influence of history, negotiation, or assumption.
Grouping roles into grades or bands based on their scores, so comparable roles land in comparable pay bands.
Testing the results specifically for gender patterns — checking whether the resulting structure creates or removes any imbalance.
Applying it consistently going forward, so new roles and pay decisions are set against the same framework, not negotiated from scratch each time.

What employers should do now

Map your current roles and pay, even informally, and look for patterns — particularly where certain roles or pay bands skew heavily toward one gender.
For any pay difference between roles, be able to state a genuine, evidenced, job-related reason — not an assumption about “the market” that’s never actually been tested.
Document the reasoning behind pay decisions at the time you make them. As the Co-op case shows, these decisions can resurface as evidence long after they’re made.
Don’t assume standardised roles protect you either way. The Tesco case shows structure cuts both ways — it can support your position, but only if it’s been properly documented.
Consider a proportionate job evaluation exercise if you have more than a small handful of distinct roles, especially where roles differ in nature but might be comparable in value.
Don’t wait for a claim to look into this. Every case above took years and significant cost to resolve — the far cheaper option is addressing pay structure proactively.

How Cheviot HR can help

Equal pay risk isn’t about the size of your business — it’s about whether your pay decisions can be explained and defended. We can review your current pay structure, run a job evaluation exercise proportionate to your business, and help you build a defensible, consistent approach to pay that holds up to scrutiny.

Get in touch at heidi@cheviothr.co.uk or visit https://cheviothr.co.uk to talk through what this means for your business.