Minimum wage across Europe: good news for Brussels

Eurostat has published, last February, statistics on minimum wages across Europe. Belgium is well ranked. With EUR 1532 Belgium is indeed one of the countries with the highest minimum wage across Europe.

Compared with the other EU countries, only Luxembourg, which is leading the ranking with EUR 1,999€, Ireland and the Netherlands exceed the Belgian minimum wage, for the first semester of 2017. The Belgian one reaches  EUR 1,531.93 and it has increased by 4% over the last five years.

Today, 22 out of the 28 EU Member States (Denmark, Italy, Cyprus, Austria, Finland and Sweden are the exceptions) have a national minimum wage, as all the EU candidate countries (Montenegro, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Albania, Serbia and Turkey). As of 1 January 2017, monthly minimum wages varied widely across the Member States, from EUR 235 in Bulgaria to EUR 1 999 in Luxembourg.

However, you probably think the minimum wage is not enough to assess how the salaries are in Belgium. The average wage is yet another good news for Brussels. The Federal Public Service for Economy has published statistics on the average salaries across Belgium few months ago.

The statistics take into account salaries in 2014 in the whole country. In 2014, the average wage reached EUR 3414 gross in Belgium. Brussels-Capital was (and is) the richest part of the country, with EUR 3908 gross, while the EU average salary was EUR 2,814.