The Czechs had the highest average gross wages among the Visegrád countries until 2022.Continue reading
The minimum wage would rise by roughly HUF 140,000 by 2027, said Sándor Czomba, State Secretary for Employment Policy at the Ministry for National Economy.
The government remains committed to a meaningful increase in the mandatory minimum wage, which can only be achieved through a consensus between employers’ and employees’ interest groups, the politician told Világgazdaság. “Negotiations on mandatory minimum wages are currently taking place within the framework of the Permanent Consultative Forum of the Private Sector and the Government (VKF).
It is too early to speculate on how the minimum wage will evolve in the coming years, as the negotiations are far from over and the government is not dictating the pace,”
the politician said.
The state secretary for employment policy made these comments after Minister for National Economy Márton Nagy’s remarks in an interview with Index were described by 444 as “a big statement.”
The state secretary indicated that negotiations are also underway on the transposition of the EU’s minimum wage directive, which will set the course for what happens in the near future on the wage front. The primary consideration in raising the minimum wage is always that it should not jeopardize employment gains, i.e. cause redundancies in businesses, he added.
The direction of the negotiations is to raise the minimum wage to 50% of the current average wage, which could be achieved by 2027. “Contrary to what is reported on 444, this would not mean a gross increase of HUF 50,000 (EUR 127) over three years, but – taking into account the convergence program forecast – roughly HUF 140,000 (EUR 355), which can be considered an ambitious commitment,” the state secretary said.
Based on Sándor Czomba’s statement,
the Hungarian government expects the average gross wage to rise to HUF 800,000 (EUR 2,030) in 2027. This would mean that in the next three years the net minimum wage would increase by HUF 30,000 (EUR 76) per year, not by HUF 11,000 (EUR 28) net.
He said that the reality is greatly distorted if, for instance, the Hungarian minimum wage is compared with the Romanian minimum wage, since in Hungary’s eastern neighbor more than a quarter of the workforce, some two million people, are employed on minimum wages, while in Hungary it is a fraction of that. Another important piece of labor market information that is part of the overall picture is that the Romanian employment rate is orders of magnitude lower than the Hungarian one: while in 2023 the Romanian employment rate for the 15-64 age group was 63.1%, the figure for Hungary was 74.8%.
Via Világgazdaság, Featured image: Pexels
