Purchasing power and real wages in Europe: what pay buys after inflation
From 2019 to 2024 pay outran prices in 19 of 26 countries and fell behind in 7. How real wages are measured, and what the same money buys across countries.
Between 2019 and 2024 the average full-time salary in Italy rose by 11.0% and consumer prices by 18.5%, so the same salary bought about 6.3% less. In Bulgaria pay rose by 76.9% and prices by 31.1%, so it bought about 34.9% more. That division of pay by prices gives a real wage, and it is the first meaning of purchasing power: what a salary buys compared with an earlier year. The second meaning compares countries: what the same money buys in Sofia, Berlin or Lisbon. This article covers both, shows the method and says where each measure stops being reliable.
Two meanings of "purchasing power"
A nominal wage counts currency units. A real wage divides those units by a price index, so it follows what the pay can buy. When the European Commission reports real wages it states its method plainly: "Real wages were computed using the harmonised index of consumer prices as deflator" (Labour Market and Wage Developments in Europe, 2025). The HICP is the consumer price index calculated in the EU under a harmonised approach and a single set of definitions, mainly used to measure inflation (Eurostat glossary); it is the index used throughout this site, and HICP vs CPI explains how it differs from national indices.
Between countries the question is different, because prices differ as well as pay. Eurostat's purchasing power standard (PPS) is "an artificial currency unit": in theory one PPS buys the same amount of goods and services in every country, and PPS values are derived by dividing an amount in national currency by the country's purchasing power parity (Eurostat glossary). The first meaning follows one country through time; the second compares countries at one date. They answer different questions and should not be mixed.
How a real wage is calculated here
The pay figure is Eurostat's average full-time adjusted salary per employee (nama_10_fte), the series on the site's average salary pages. Eurostat builds it from the national accounts, as wages and salaries divided by the number of employees, multiplied by the ratio of the usual weekly hours of full-time employees to those of all employees from the Labour Force Survey (Eurostat metadata). It is a gross figure for the whole economy and covers every EU country except the Netherlands. The latest year is 2024; the dataset was last updated on 12 November 2025.
The price figure is the HICP: the annual average of Eurostat's monthly index (prc_hicp_minr) for 2024 divided by the annual average for 2019. Pay is taken in each country's own currency, so exchange rates play no part. The real change is the pay ratio divided by the price ratio:
- Germany: pay 1.200 (€44,827 in 2019, €53,791 in 2024), prices 1.223; 1.200 ÷ 1.223 = 0.981, a real change of −1.9%.
The euro column of the table below converts national currencies at exchange rates and is there for scale only.
The euro area: pay lost to prices in 2020 and 2022
For the 20 euro-area countries that Eurostat's series covers (Bulgaria is not in it), the calculation can be run year by year.
| Euro area (20 countries) | Pay (%) | Prices (%) | Real pay (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | −1.4 | +0.2 | −1.7 |
| 2021 | +4.2 | +2.6 | +1.6 |
| 2022 | +4.7 | +8.4 | −3.4 |
| 2023 | +5.8 | +5.4 | +0.3 |
| 2024 | +4.1 | +2.4 | +1.7 |
| 2019 to 2024 | +18.5 | +20.3 | −1.5 |
euroflation's calculation from Eurostat nama_10_fte (euro) and the annual average of prc_hicp_minr for the 20-country euro area (the annual rates equal those in prc_hicp_ainr). Each year is compared with the one before. This site's euro-area inflation pages use 21 countries since Bulgaria joined on 1 January 2026, so a figure there can differ by 0.1.
In 2022 prices rose by 8.4% on average and pay by 4.7%. Pay grew faster than prices again in 2023 and 2024, but the five years together still end 1.5% short of 2019.
Country by country, 2019 to 2024
The table covers the 26 countries in Eurostat's series (every EU member except the Netherlands) and is sorted by the real change.
| Country | Average salary 2024 (€) | Pay 2019–2024 (%) | Prices 2019–2024 (%) | Real pay (%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bulgaria | 15,387 | +76.9 | +31.1 | +34.9 |
| Romania | 21,108 | +77.9 | +38.6 | +28.4 |
| Hungary | 18,461 | +77.9 | +52.2 | +16.9 |
| Croatia | 23,446 | +48.3 | +28.1 | +15.7 |
| Lithuania | 29,104 | +58.7 | +37.8 | +15.2 |
| Portugal | 24,818 | +33.7 | +17.8 | +13.5 |
| Slovenia | 35,133 | +36.7 | +21.7 | +12.4 |
| Poland | 21,246 | +56.1 | +41.9 | +10.0 |
| Latvia | 22,262 | +43.7 | +33.9 | +7.3 |
| Malta | 33,499 | +24.7 | +16.5 | +7.1 |
| Cyprus | 27,611 | +23.3 | +16.2 | +6.1 |
| Luxembourg | 82,969 | +24.4 | +17.8 | +5.6 |
| Ireland | 61,051 | +21.6 | +17.4 | +3.6 |
| Belgium | 59,632 | +25.4 | +22.0 | +2.8 |
| Estonia | 26,546 | +44.0 | +40.4 | +2.6 |
| Denmark | 71,565 | +18.8 | +16.2 | +2.2 |
| Austria | 58,600 | +28.2 | +25.4 | +2.2 |
| Slovakia | 20,287 | +36.5 | +34.6 | +1.4 |
| Spain | 33,700 | +19.6 | +18.3 | +1.1 |
| Finland | 49,428 | +13.7 | +15.7 | −1.7 |
| Germany | 53,791 | +20.0 | +22.3 | −1.9 |
| France | 43,790 | +14.3 | +17.5 | −2.7 |
| Sweden | 46,525 | +16.6 | +20.6 | −3.3 |
| Greece | 17,954 | +12.4 | +16.4 | −3.4 |
| Czechia | 23,998 | +35.2 | +40.9 | −4.1 |
| Italy | 33,523 | +11.0 | +18.5 | −6.3 |
euroflation's calculation from Eurostat nama_10_fte (national currency; euro column at exchange rates) and prc_hicp_minr (annual averages), 2024 against 2019. The real change is computed from unrounded values, so it can differ by 0.1 from the rounded columns.
Pay grew faster than prices in 19 of the 26 countries and more slowly in 7: Finland, Germany, France, Sweden, Greece, Czechia and Italy. Pay rose by more than half in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Lithuania and Poland, where prices rose by between 31% and 52%. The real change says nothing about the level: Bulgaria's real gain of 34.9% still leaves it with the lowest salary in the table, €15,387 in 2024. In Czechia pay rose by 35.2% but prices rose by 40.9%.
What the European Commission finds
The Commission's annual review of labour market and wage developments, published in October 2025, measures real wages with its AMECO database and the HICP. It reports that real wages "dropped substantially in 2022 and, more moderately, in the first half of 2023", that annualised real wage growth turned positive in the third quarter of 2023 and reached 2.7% in 2024, and that in 2024 real wages in the EU "remained 0.7% below their 2019 levels on average" (chapter 2). The same chapter sorts the countries into groups. Real wages exceeded their 2019 levels by 12% to 18% in Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Portugal and Slovenia and by more than 20% in Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania; in Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, Malta, Slovakia and Spain they exceeded them by less than 7%; they stood less than 3% below in Finland, France, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Sweden, and over 4% below in Czechia and Italy.
The two sets of figures agree on the direction in most countries: the nine countries the Commission places below 2019 include the seven that fall below zero in the table, plus the Netherlands, which Eurostat's series does not cover, and Luxembourg. They do not match country by country. The Commission's country figures are drawn from AMECO (its Graph 2.5), a different wage series from the Eurostat salary used here, and the report does not set out the reconciliation. Latvia and Poland, for example, are in its 12% to 18% group against 7.3% and 10.0% in the table, Croatia is above 20% there against 15.7% here, and Luxembourg is below 2019 there against +5.6% here. The Commission's figures are its own published measure; the table applies the same idea, pay divided by the HICP, to the salary that appears on the site's own pages.
Household income is a different question
Eurostat also publishes an official real-terms series for households as a whole: gross disposable income of households per head, deflated by a price index for household consumption, with 2008 equal to 100 (tepsr_wc310). It is not a wage series: it measures the disposable income of households (including non-profit institutions serving households) as a whole, divided by the population and by a price deflator for household consumption; Eurostat's metadata describes this calculation for the adjusted variant of the income, which adds social transfers in kind. In the EU it stood at 107.97 in 2019 and 115.57 in 2025, 7.0% higher; in the euro area (21 countries) it rose from 104.95 to 110.64, 5.4% higher. A salary can fall behind prices in a year when household income does not, and the reverse.
Between countries: what the minimum wage buys
A direct cross-country example is Eurostat's minimum wage series, which gives the gross monthly national minimum wage in euro and in PPS, converted with purchasing power parities for household consumption (earn_mw_cur; metadata). It covers the 22 EU members with a national minimum wage; Austria, Denmark, Finland, Italy and Sweden are not among them. The table shows the rate in force on 1 July 2026, sorted by PPS.
| Country | Euro (€ a month) | PPS (a month) |
|---|---|---|
| Germany | 2,343 | 2,164 |
| Luxembourg | 2,771 | 2,108 |
| Netherlands | 2,338 | 2,023 |
| Belgium | 2,234 | 1,922 |
| Ireland | 2,391 | 1,756 |
| France | 1,867 | 1,692 |
| Slovenia | 1,482 | 1,660 |
| Spain | 1,425 | 1,556 |
| Poland | 1,119 | 1,547 |
| Lithuania | 1,153 | 1,393 |
| Croatia | 1,050 | 1,339 |
| Romania | 825 | 1,317 |
| Portugal | 1,073 | 1,240 |
| Greece | 1,073 | 1,229 |
| Cyprus | 1,088 | 1,220 |
| Malta | 994 | 1,081 |
| Slovakia | 915 | 1,074 |
| Hungary | 906 | 1,048 |
| Czechia | 923 | 1,015 |
| Bulgaria | 620 | 993 |
| Latvia | 780 | 938 |
| Estonia | 946 | 935 |
Source: Eurostat, earn_mw_cur, 1 July 2026 (2026-S2), gross monthly amounts; the PPS series uses the latest purchasing power parities available, and Eurostat flags the 2026 PPS values as estimates.
In euros the highest rate (Luxembourg, €2,771) is 4.5 times the lowest (Bulgaria, €620); in PPS the highest (Germany, 2,164) is 2.3 times the lowest (Estonia, 935). The order changes too. Spain's minimum wage is 27% higher than Poland's in euros (€1,425 against €1,119) but the two are within 1% in PPS (1,556 against 1,547). In seven countries (Belgium, Estonia, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands) the PPS figure is lower than the euro figure. The site's minimum wage pages show the euro amounts and history for each country.
What these numbers leave out
- An average, not a typical worker. The salary is a mean: total wages divided by employees, scaled to full-time hours. It moves when the mix of jobs changes as well as when pay for the same job changes.
- Before tax. The figures are gross, before income tax and employee social contributions. Eurostat's net earnings series (
earn_nt_netft) has PPS and real-terms versions, but in its release of 1 October 2026 the 2024 amounts are about one twelfth of the annual amounts around them and are flagged as a break in series, and the resulting real changes (about −90% for 2024 and about +1,100% for 2025 in the EU countries) are not usable, so this article does not rely on it. - One price index. The HICP follows household consumer spending, and its metadata lists imputed rentals for housing, the notional rent of owner-occupiers, among the items it does not cover. See what is in the inflation basket and house prices, rents and inflation. A household with a different budget faces a different price change; food inflation is one example.
- Timing. The salary series ends in 2024, so this article cannot say what happened to pay in 2025 or 2026. The Commission's 2025 figures in its review are projections, and are not repeated here.
- Not adequacy. A positive real change means pay bought more than in 2019; it does not say whether the pay is enough.
Where to look on this site
- The inflation calculator turns a price change into an amount: enter a sum and two months, and it gives the equivalent using the HICP. Each country has its own version, for example Germany.
- The average salary and minimum wage pages rank the countries and show each country's history; the euro-area salary page shows the aggregate used above.
- Grocery prices compare the price level of food between countries, and the euro-area inflation page has the latest monthly rate.
- What a saver earns is the other side of the same arithmetic: the deposit rates page sets what banks paid households on one-year deposits in each euro-area country against inflation.
The short version
- A real wage is pay divided by prices. From 2019 to 2024 it rose in 19 of 26 countries and fell in 7 (Finland, Germany, France, Sweden, Greece, Czechia, Italy); in the 20-country euro area pay rose 18.5% and prices 20.3%.
- In the euro area real pay fell in 2020 and 2022 and rose in 2021, 2023 and 2024.
- The European Commission puts EU real wages in 2024 at 0.7% below 2019; its country figures use a different wage series, so they differ from the table for some countries.
- Between countries, PPS removes price-level differences: the gap between the highest and lowest minimum wage is 4.5 times in euros and 2.3 times in PPS.
- The data are gross, averaged, and end in 2024; they do not say whether pay is enough.
Figures: Eurostat (average full-time adjusted salary nama_10_fte, HICP prc_hicp_minr and prc_hicp_ainr, minimum wages earn_mw_cur, real household income tepsr_wc310, net earnings earn_nt_netft) and the European Commission (Labour Market and Wage Developments in Europe, Annual Review 2025). euroflation is an independent tracker and is not affiliated with Eurostat, the European Commission or the EU. Nothing here is financial advice. Quotations are from the English originals.