Minimum wage

This year’s report presents the minimum wage rates for 2025 and how they were set and uprated during 2024. It includes information on countries with and without national minimum wages. In addition, it provides the first comparative overview of how Member States have transposed the Minimum Wage Directive and presents new estimates of the proportion of minimum wage earners and their ability to afford housing. Finally, it summarises research on minimum wages published during 2024.

In this pilot project, Eurofound successfully established the feasibility of, and piloted, an EU-wide database of minimum pay rates contained in collective agreements related to low-paid workers. A conceptual and measurement framework was devised, a total of 692 collective agreements – related to 24 low-paid sectors of interest – were selected to be ‘fully coded’ and representative data on negotiated minimum pay were compiled for 24 EU Member States. Based on more than 3,202 renewal texts, time series of collectively agreed minimum rates were created from 2015 to 2022 for 19 countries. This is the first time that an EU-wide data collection has provided comparative time series on negotiated pay. Key findings are is that in some countries outdated agreements contain rates below the applicable statutory minima, and that the potential of collective agreements to regulate pay generally or for employees earning higher wages than the minimum pay is not always fully capitalised on.

See also the national country reports (Eurofound papers), providing meta-data for the data collection, at the end of this web page.

This report is carried out in the context of the three-year pilot project (2021–2023), ‘Role of the minimum wage in establishing the Universal Labour Guarantee’, mandated to Eurofound by the European Commission. Its focus is module 3 of the project, investigating minimum wages and other forms of pay for the self-employed. Out of concern for the challenging conditions faced by certain groups of self-employed workers, some Member States have established or are in discussions about proposing some statutory forms of minimum pay for selected categories of the self-employed. The main objective of the report is to understand how minimum wages, wage rates, tariffs, fees and other forms of pay could be fixed for specific jobs or professions in sectors having a high level of ‘vulnerable’ workers, as well as ‘concealed’ self-employed. While the majority of Member States allow trade union representation, the right to collective bargaining for the self-employed is much more limited. Only a small number of Member States provide examples of collectively agreed minimum wages or other forms of pay for the self-employed.