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Minimum wage in Europe 2026: every country, one table

Salaries9 min · 2026-09-29

The minimum wage in Europe 2026 runs from €620 a month in Bulgaria to €2,771 in Luxembourg, and five EU countries do not have one at all. That is the whole spread in one sentence; the rest of this guide is the table behind it, taken from Eurostat's July 2026 release, the hourly rates from the national government pages for Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, France and the UK, what the countries without a statutory minimum do instead, and what we can add from our own data. The minimum wage is a floor, not a junior salary, so we cannot tell you what entry-level jobs pay from the Eurostat table. What we can tell you is where the junior-friendly jobs are: 5,643 of the 29,410 listings we track as of 17 September 2026 are junior-friendly, and the last section shows where the English-language ones sit.

Minimum wage in Europe 2026: the full table

Eurostat publishes minimum wages twice a year, for 1 January and 1 July, as gross monthly amounts before tax and social contributions. The July 2026 release covers 22 of the 27 EU countries. It puts them in three groups: above €1,500 a month (Luxembourg, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and France, from €1,867 in France to €2,771 in Luxembourg), €1,000 to €1,500 (Slovenia, Spain, Lithuania, Poland, Cyprus, Greece, Portugal and Croatia, from €1,050 in Croatia to €1,482 in Slovenia), and below €1,000 (Malta, Estonia, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Latvia and Bulgaria, from €620 in Bulgaria to €994 in Malta). Two things to know before you read the table. Eurostat converts hourly minimums (Germany, Ireland, France) and 14-payment systems (Spain) into a single 12-month figure, so the number here is not always the number on the national page. And for Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Romania the figure is converted from the local currency at the end-of-June 2026 exchange rate.

Highest and lowest: what the ranking hides

In euro, Luxembourg's minimum is 4.5 times Bulgaria's. Adjust for what the money buys and the gap shrinks to 2.3 times, and the order changes: in purchasing power standards Germany is top at PPS 2,164 and Estonia bottom at PPS 935, with Bulgaria at PPS 993 just above it (Eurostat, July 2026). The nine countries at or above PPS 1,500 are Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, France, Slovenia, Spain and Poland, which is why Poland and Spain keep coming up in guides about affordable first moves. The other useful measure is the minimum as a share of median earnings: for 2024, Eurostat's latest reference year, it ranged from 44 % in Estonia to 69 % in Portugal. A high ratio means the minimum sits close to what a typical worker earns, which is a warning if you hope to be paid well above it. Last, direction of travel: between July 2016 and July 2026 the minimum grew fastest in Lithuania (11.7 % a year), Romania (11.6 %) and Bulgaria (11.2 %), and slowest in France (2.4 %) and Malta (3.2 %).

Hourly rates: Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, France, the UK

Most people are paid by the hour at the bottom of the market, and the hourly figure is what the national law states. Germany: €13.90 gross an hour from 1 January 2026, and €14.60 from 1 January 2027, set under the Minimum Wage Act and enforced by customs (Zoll). Ireland: €14.15 an hour from 1 January 2026 for anyone aged 20 or over, with 90 % at 19 (€12.74), 80 % at 18 (€11.32) and 70 % under 18 (€9.91), per Citizens Information. The Netherlands: €14.71 an hour from 1 January 2026 and €14.99 from 1 July 2026 for anyone 21 or older, with youth rates of €11.99 at 20, €8.99 at 19 and €7.50 at 18 in the second half of the year; since 2024 there is no fixed monthly minimum, so the monthly figure is your contracted hours times the rate (Rijksoverheid). France: the SMIC is €12.31 gross an hour, €1,867.02 gross a month on a 35-hour week, under the decree of 22 May 2026 (Service-Public, checked 1 June 2026). The UK is not in the Eurostat table because it is not in the EU, so here is the official rate: the National Living Wage is £12.71 an hour from April 2026 for anyone 21 and over, with £10.85 for 18 to 20 year olds and £8.00 for under-18s and apprentices (gov.uk). The rates change every 1 April.

Net pay at 25: what the official pages actually say

If you are 25, you are on the full adult rate everywhere in this guide: 20 or over in Ireland, 21 or over in the Netherlands and the UK, and one published adult rate in Germany and France. What you keep after tax and contributions is a different question, and most governments do not print it next to the minimum wage. France is the exception: Service-Public lists the SMIC at €1,477.93 net a month for a 35-hour week, alongside the €1,867.02 gross figure. For the other countries there is no official net figure on the minimum wage page, and we do not estimate, so the honest answer is: run your contract through the national tax authority's own calculator before you sign. Three things to check at the same time. In Spain the €1,221 monthly SMI comes in 14 payments (Social Security, 2026), so the two extra payments land in summer and at Christmas unless your contract prorates them. In the Netherlands the rate steps up every 1 January and 1 July, so a contract signed in spring is on a different rate by summer. And in Germany the €13.90 is per hour worked, so a 40-hour contract and a 35-hour contract at the same rate are two different monthly salaries.

Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Austria, Italy: no statutory minimum

Five EU countries have no national minimum wage: Denmark, Italy, Austria, Finland and Sweden. Neither do Iceland, Norway or Switzerland. In all eight, Eurostat notes, minimum pay is laid down by collective agreements for specific sectors rather than by one law for everyone. In practice the floor for a hotel job in Stockholm is in the hotel and restaurant agreement, the floor for a warehouse job in Copenhagen is in the transport agreement, and there is no single number for the country. What it changes for you is where to look: the ad, or the contract, names the agreement that applies, and the union for that sector publishes the current rates. If an employer in one of these countries will not say which agreement covers the job, that is the question to ask twice. Our guide to hotel and restaurant jobs in Europe covers the sector where this matters most.

What nobody mentions

First, Eurostat's table is a July snapshot and several countries move in January, so the German figure of €2,343 will be superseded when the €14.60 rate arrives on 1 January 2027, and Eurostat's next update is planned for January 2027. Second, the monthly figure and the hourly figure do not always match what your payslip will show. Eurostat's €1,425 for Spain is the 14-payment €1,221 spread over 12 months, and the Dutch €2,338 is a calculation, not a legal amount, because the Netherlands abolished fixed monthly minimums in 2024. Third, the minimum is a floor. A country with a high minimum is not a country where junior jobs pay well; it is a country where the worst legal job pays that much. Fourth, a high minimum relative to median earnings means many workers sit at or near it: in 2022, 12.7 % of French employees earned less than 105 % of the minimum, the second-highest share in the EU after Bulgaria's 13.0 % (Eurostat, SES 2022).

Where the junior jobs are: our data

Entry-level pay is not in Eurostat's data, and the ads themselves rarely state a salary, so we do not pretend to know what a first job pays in each country. What we do know is where the junior-friendly jobs are, because we read the requirements out of every ad. Of the 29,410 listings we track as of 17 September 2026, 5,643 are junior-friendly, and among those with the ad written in English, Germany leads with about 130, then France with just over 80, the United Kingdom with just over 70, the Netherlands with about 60, Spain with about 50, Italy with just over 40 and Sweden with just under 40. Portugal, Denmark and Ireland follow with fewer than 20 each. Set that against the wage table and the pattern is clear: the three biggest junior markets in English (Germany, France, the UK) are also three of the higher-floor countries, while Ireland, with the second-highest minimum in the EU, has one of the smallest junior-in-English pools we track. If your plan is a high floor and a junior job, Germany and the Netherlands are where the numbers line up; Ireland pays well at the bottom but has fewer doors. The entry-level jobs in Germany in English guide goes deeper on the biggest of the three.

The minimum wage tells you the floor. Our listings tell you which doors are open above it. Browse the junior-friendly listings, filter by country, and read the requirements out of the ad rather than the title. Buen camino.

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