In September 2026, Next won its appeal against a £30m equal pay ruling after the Employment Appeal Tribunal accepted that recruitment pressures justified paying warehouse staff more than shop-floor workers doing work of equal value. 

Asda's case is still running. In 2025, a tribunal found that 12 of 14 store roles were of equal value to warehouse roles, and the claim, which lawyers value at up to £1.2bn, has moved to the stage where Asda has to explain the pay gap.

Both cases turn on the same question: can the employer show why pay differs? That question is about to come up more often. The government's consultation on pay transparency, which includes pay in job adverts and a possible Equal Pay Enforcement Unit, closes on 27 October 2026.

The Employment Rights Act 2025 is being phased in, and large employers will soon be required to add equality action plans to their gender pay gap reports.

For UK comp teams, that changes what compensation planning software has to do. Running the pay review is only part of the job. The system also has to hold the reasoning behind every decision. This guide compares three tools on that basis, then covers the rules, the features to look for and the questions to ask.

You're reading this if

• You run pay reviews for a UK workforce, on their own or alongside EU and other entities
• Your gender pay gap report still starts with a spreadsheet export
• You need to explain pay differences to leadership, employees or a tribunal
• You want salary ranges ready in case pay in job adverts becomes law
• You are comparing compensation planning software and want to know what each tool covers in the UK

The best compensation planning software for UK businesses at a glance

1. Compport

Compport is a compensation management platform for comp teams that run complex, multi-country pay cycles. Merit, bonus, long-term incentives, sales incentives, total rewards statements, and pay equity all run on a single platform that supports 1.5M+ users across 300+ customers in 37+ countries.

For UK employers, two layers matter. Compport's Pay Equity Management tools handle the core work of UK pay transparency: gender pay gap calculations, salary bands and documented justifications. On top of that, CompportIQ, Compport's compensation intelligence layer, analyzes and explains pay equity on your live data.

Pay equity and pay transparency in Compport

• Gender pay gap calculations: automate data collection for your gender pay gap figures and keep an audit trail behind every submission.
• Ready for ethnicity and disability reporting: manage demographic data securely, so you can run the same analysis by ethnicity and disability when reporting becomes law.
• Salary bands you can publish: build bands by country, function, sub-function, business unit, level and grade. Design pay progression, ranges and job families in one place, then share ranges internally or in job adverts when the rules take effect.
• Market data kept current: bring internal and external benchmarking data into a single view, with automatic checks that remove anomalies and data aging, keeping bands competitive.
• Pay for new roles: price a job with no external benchmark by blending skills from existing roles.
• Documented justifications: analyze pay across demographics and job families, and record the reasons behind pay differences through built-in audit workflows. That record is what an equal pay defense relies on.
• Consistent offers: the Candidate Offer Module builds offers inside your ranges, so the pay you advertise matches the pay you offer.
• Controlled access: decide who sees which ranges and pay data, down to the stakeholder.
• Dashboards that answer the hard questions: track the pay equity gap, compa-ratio changes, possible bias in pay recommendations, and budget position.

CompportIQ: the intelligence layer on top

CompportIQ adds six purpose-built agents to Compport, including Pay Equity, Benchmarking and Comp Planner. They work on your live Compport data, inside your bands, rules and approval chains. For UK pay equity, that adds:

• Explaining gaps: see the adjusted pay gap, whether it is statistically significant, which cohorts are affected and how many employees are at risk, then drill into the factors driving it.
• Separating real gaps from data issues: when a cohort's gap looks implausibly large, CompportIQ flags it for a reasonableness check instead of reporting it as a finding.
• Representation by level: see where men and women sit in your hierarchy, which helps explain your pay quartile figures and shape your equality action plan.
• Closing gaps through the pay review: describe a goal, such as closing gaps over three years within the same budget, and the Comp Planner builds the merit plan with the cost of each year for the comp leader to review and approve.
• Audit-ready output: export an auditor packet with the inputs and method behind a result.

CompportIQ, an AI pay equity software, is also built for the questions the ICO is asking about AI in employment decisions. Figures come from deterministic, tested calculations, and the language model only explains them. Agents run with the permissions of the person asking; every recommendation goes through your approval workflow, every action is logged, and your data never trains any model.

Everything else Compport covers

• Compensation planning: merit and promotion cycles with budgets, guidelines and multi-level approvals
• Bonus planning and long-term incentives
• Sales incentives planning
• Total rewards statements
• HR analytics with 200+ pre-built reports and dashboards

Pros

• Pay equity, salary bands, planning and approvals on one platform, so the reasoning behind every pay decision stays with it
• Gender pay gap calculations with an audit trail, and data management ready for ethnicity and disability reporting
• CompportIQ explains what drives a gap, and every figure comes from a calculation on your data
• Multi-country, multi-entity cycles for UK employers with international operations
• Implementation within 12weeks, with support turnaround as fast as 4 hours
• ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II certified, with published GDPR compliance information

Cons

• Newer platform compared with legacy competitors

2. beqom

beqom is a total compensation platform for  enterprises, covering compensation planning and sales performance management. Its pay equity product, PayEquity by beqom, came through its 2023 acquisition of PayAnalytics and includes UK-specific reporting.

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