Minimum wages in 2026: Annual review

All EU Member States have minimum wage floors, but two main types of system can be distinguished: most Member States (22) have a national minimum wage, setting a universal wage floor in addition to those that may be negotiated by social partners; 5 Member States (and Norway) have no statutory legal rate and multiple wage floors are set through collective bargaining by social partners for various occupations and, in particular, sectors.

Directive (EU) 2022/2041 on adequate minimum wages in the European Union (the Minimum Wage Directive), passed in 2022, provides a common framework for the setting of adequate (statutory) minimum wages, promotes collective bargaining on wage setting and seeks to ensure the effective access of workers to their rights to minimum wage protection, where such protection is provided for in national legislation and/or collective agreements. Member States were required to transpose the directive into their national regulations by 15 November 2024, and most had done so (at least partially) by the end of 2024. In 2023, Denmark (supported by Sweden) filed an action for the full or partial annulment of the directive before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The ruling, in November 2025, upheld the validity of the most significant provisions of the Minimum Wage Directive, although it required the elimination of the list of specific elements to be included among the national criteria used to set minimum wages.

Minimum wage rates in 2026

• Gross national minimum wage rates increased between January 2025 and January 2026 in 21 of the 22 Member States that have a national minimum wage, Romania being the only one in which the rate remained unchanged (although a 7 % hike was implemented in July as this report was being edited). As in previous years, the most significant increases took place mostly in central and eastern European Member States, which continue their upward convergence dynamic: Slovenia (16 %), Bulgaria, Slovakia, Lithuania and Hungary (around 12 % or 11 %) and Croatia and Czechia (around 8 %). Hikes of more than 8 % were also applied in Cyprus and Germany (in Cyprus, the minimum wage had been frozen in 2025, since reviews of the national minimum wage level take place every two years).

• The average magnitude of this year’s increases in nominal national minimum wage rates in the Member States is only slightly below that of last year’s, while inflation levels were significantly lower in January 2026 than in January 2025, which has resulted in purchasing power gains among minimum wage earners in all Member States except Romania.

• As price increases had returned to normal levels by the time of this year’s uprates in January 2026, the Minimum Wage Directive (rather than inflation) appears to have been a factor driving the minimum wage increases as many Member States aimed to ensure that their nominal rates reached a certain value expressed in relation to average/median wages. This was in line with the directive’s requirement that they ‘use indicative reference values to guide their assessment of adequacy’.

• The Kaitz index (the ratio of the minimum wage to the average wage) has increased over the past decade in most Member States, which means that national minimum wages have grown more than average wages during this period.

• Tax and benefit systems can lead to significant differences between the gross minimum wage rate and actual take-home pay (the net minimum wage rate). In 2025, the taxation rate for minimum wage earners (including personal income tax and employee social insurance contributions and minus benefits) ranged from less than 5 % in Malta, Belgium and Luxembourg to more than 30 % in Romania, Hungary and Slovenia.

Transposition of the Minimum Wage Directive

• Following the transposition deadline in 2024, a number of Member States implemented for the first time in 2025 the new procedures under their new regulations transposing the Minimum Wage Directive. However, in terms of the process, this did not lead to major changes, and minimum wages for 2026 were largely set following the same playbook as in previous years, through consultation with or deliberation by the same actors.

• Due to the pending ruling of the CJEU on the validity of the Minimum Wage Directive, transposition processes in many Member States stalled during 2025, especially those that had not passed laws before the 2024 deadline. The notable exception was the Netherlands, which passed a bill to transpose the directive in early 2026.

• The effect of the directive on the setting of minimum wages could be clearly seen in the 2026 increases. The majority of Member States used some sort of indicative reference values in setting minimum wages for 2026.

Effects on collective bargaining

• Judging from Eurofound’s database on minimum wages for low-paid workers in collective agreements, national minimum wages are increasingly catching up with collectively agreed wage floors. This often results in the compression of the pay scales negotiated by social partners at the lower end of the wage distribution, which may limit their capacity to negotiate significantly higher floors for employees with more experience and skills. This is observed across all low-paid sectors covered by the database, although labour shortages can sometimes mitigate the effect in some sectors.

• Looking at individual agreements reveals that national minimum wages increasingly influence and change collective bargaining outcomes. Observed effects include collectively agreed wage rates being tied to national minimum wages through provisions in collective agreements and an increased focus on non-wage benefits.

• The Minimum Wage Directive has emerged as an important factor guiding statutory minimum wage setting, as a growing number of Member States are using its indicative reference values when deciding on their uprates. The CJEU ruling is unlikely to change this, since the mention of those reference values has been unaffected.

• The list of elements to be included among national criteria for minimum wage setting has been annulled by the CJEU ruling. It remains to be seen whether Member States that had already included them in their processes will decide to leave them in place.

• In line with the directive’s provisions for Member States with collective bargaining coverage rates below 80 %, measures to enhance collective bargaining and the first action plans to promote it started to emerge in 2025. Following the CJEU ruling, which confirms the validity of the provisions on the promotion of collective bargaining, it is important that Member States actively strengthen the role of social partners and promote effective collective bargaining.

• Global tensions, such as the current Strait of Hormuz crisis, and their impact on price levels will partly determine the extent to which the trend in minimum wages in real terms described in this report will hold over the rest of 2026. During the cost-of-living crisis in the years 2022–2024, governments stepped in to protect purchasing power among minimum wage earners, in many cases hiking national minimum wages in the middle of the year. In Belgium, an automatic indexation of the minimum wage has already been triggered, in April 2026.