In 2015, the minimum wage in Bulgaria was €1.10 per hour. In Germany, it was €8.50. The ratio was roughly 13 to 1: thirteen euros earned in Germany for every one euro earned at the Bulgarian floor.
By 2026, Bulgaria’s minimum wage has reached €3.73 per hour. Germany’s stands at €13.90. The ratio is now about 4 to 1. The gap has narrowed. It has not closed.
That compression is the story of eastern EU minimum wages over the past decade. The catch-up is real and measurable. So is the distance that remains.
Where the gap stands today
Data table: EU statutory minimum wages, 2026 (EUR/hr), East/West classification
| Country | EUR/hr | Classification |
|---|---|---|
| Luxembourg | €15.63 | Western EU |
| Netherlands | €14.71 | Western EU |
| Ireland | €14.15 | Western EU |
| Germany | €13.90 | Western EU |
| Belgium | €13.30 | Western EU |
| France | €12.02 | Western EU |
| Slovenia | €8.55 | Eastern EU |
| Spain | €7.96 | Western EU |
| Poland | €7.45 | Eastern EU |
| Lithuania | €7.05 | Eastern EU |
| Cyprus | €6.28 | Western EU |
| Croatia | €6.06 | Eastern EU |
| Malta | €5.74 | Western EU |
| Estonia | €5.67 | Eastern EU |
| Czechia | €5.56 | Eastern EU |
| Greece | €5.31 | Western EU |
| Portugal | €5.31 | Western EU |
| Slovakia | €5.26 | Eastern EU |
| Hungary | €4.91 | Eastern EU |
| Romania | €4.79 | Eastern EU |
| Latvia | €4.50 | Eastern EU |
| Bulgaria | €3.73 | Eastern EU |
The chart above shows all 22 EU member states with statutory minimum wages, ranked by their 2026 hourly rate in euros. The eastern EU cluster occupies the lower half. Luxembourg leads at €15.63. Bulgaria trails at €3.73.
France at €12.02 and Netherlands at €14.71 sit near the top. Spain at €7.96 represents the lower end of the western EU range. Hungary at €4.91 and Romania at €4.79 sit near the bottom of the eastern cluster.
Slovenia is the exception. At €8.55, it sits above Spain (€7.96) and is the only eastern accession state (2004 enlargement) whose floor crosses any western EU peer. The majority of eastern EU countries remain well below the western EU range.
The catch-up in numbers
Data table: Eastern wages as % of German floor, 2015 vs 2026
| Country | 2015 (% of Germany) | 2026 (% of Germany) | Change (pp) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Poland | 28.4% | 47.3% | +18.9pp |
| Romania | 15.5% | 34.5% | +19.0pp |
| Bulgaria | 12.9% | 26.8% | +13.9pp |
Poland has moved the furthest in relative terms. In 2015, its minimum wage stood at 28.4% of Germany’s hourly floor. By 2026, that ratio reached 47.3%. The gap shrank from roughly 3.5 to 1 down to about 2.1 to 1.
Romania’s ratio moved from 15.5% to 34.5%. Bulgaria’s moved from 12.9% to 26.8%. All three countries nearly doubled their share of the German floor in euro terms. None reached half of it.
The comparison to Germany is not arbitrary. Germany introduced its first statutory minimum wage in 2015, the same year this analysis begins. Its floor provides a consistent baseline for the full eleven-year period.
The trajectory: how the catch-up happened
Data table: Minimum wages EUR/hr — Germany, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, 2015–2026
| Year | Germany (€/hr) | Poland (€/hr) | Romania (€/hr) | Bulgaria (€/hr) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 8.50 | 2.41 | 1.32 | 1.10 |
| 2016 | 8.50 | 2.44 | 1.41 | 1.29 |
| 2017 | 8.84 | 2.71 | 1.64 | 1.41 |
| 2018 | 8.84 | 2.84 | 2.46 | 1.57 |
| 2019 | 9.19 | 3.02 | 2.64 | 1.72 |
| 2020 | 9.35 | 3.38 | 2.77 | 1.88 |
| 2021 | 9.60 | 3.54 | 2.81 | 1.99 |
| 2022 | 12.00 | 3.70 | 3.11 | 2.18 |
| 2023 | 12.00 | 4.57 | 3.65 | 2.40 |
| 2024 | 12.41 | 5.76 | 4.47 | 2.87 |
| 2025 | 12.82 | 6.35 | 4.83 | 3.31 |
| 2026 | 13.90 | 6.58 | 4.79 | 3.73 |
The catch-up did not happen at a uniform pace. Three distinct patterns appear in the data.
Germany’s 2022 spike. Germany’s rate jumped from €9.60 in 2021 to €12.00 in 2022, a 25% increase in a single step. This was not a gradual commission adjustment. The Bundestag passed the Minimum Wage Increase Act (MiLoEG) in June 2022, bypassing the normal Mindestlohnkommission process. That legislative spike temporarily widened the nominal gap with eastern countries. The eastern floor-as-a-share-of-Germany fell briefly before resuming the upward trend.
Romania’s 2018 jump. Romania raised its monthly floor from RON 1,250 to RON 1,900 in January 2018, a 52% increase in nominal local currency terms. Converted to euros, the hourly rate moved from €1.64 to €2.46. The increase was enacted by government decision — the standard mechanism for Romanian minimum wage-setting — and is confirmed by Eurostat earn_mw_cur data (series earn_mw_cur, geo=RO, 2018-S1). This single-year jump accounts for a large share of Romania’s total catch-up in the first half of the period.
Poland’s 2023 acceleration. Poland’s hourly rate rose from €3.70 in 2022 to €4.57 in 2023, a 23% increase in euro terms. Poland raised its minimum wage twice in 2023: from PLN 3,010 in 2022 to PLN 3,490 in January 2023, then to PLN 3,600 in July 2023. Poland continued with further increases in 2024 and 2025. By 2026, Poland’s monthly minimum in PLN terms had grown by 75% since 2020. The PLN also strengthened against the euro during this period, amplifying the euro-denominated gain.
Bulgaria’s path was the most gradual. Annual increases averaged roughly 10–12% in BGN terms across the full period. The fixed peg between the BGN and the euro (1.9558 BGN/EUR, in place since 1997) means Bulgaria’s euro-denominated minimum wage tracks directly with its local-currency decisions, without any exchange-rate amplification or drag.
Did the EU Minimum Wage Directive accelerate the catch-up?
The EU adopted Directive 2022/2041/EU on 19 October 2022. Member states had until 15 November 2024 to transpose it. The directive does not set a mandatory floor. It establishes “reference values” (60% of gross median wage and 50% of gross average wage) and requires member states to assess their adequacy against those values.
The question is whether the directive accelerated the eastern catch-up or simply arrived during it.
The data supports the second reading more than the first. All four countries in this analysis were already on upward trajectories before October 2022. Poland’s 2023 surge followed the directive’s adoption, but the directive’s transposition deadline was November 2024; Poland’s increases preceded any legal obligation to act. Available data suggests the drivers were domestic: Poland’s Council of Ministers sets the rate annually after consultation with the Social Dialogue Council, and the two 2023 increases were announced through that established domestic process. Romania’s 2023 increase, similarly, followed a pattern of annual government decisions that predated the directive.
Germany’s 2022 spike did predate the directive by four months. The Bundestag passed MiLoEG on 3 June 2022; the directive was adopted on 19 October 2022. They were parallel developments, not cause and effect.
The more accurate framing: the directive created an institutional expectation. Governments in member states below the reference values now face a formal adequacy review process. A four-year window does not yet yield enough data to measure whether that mechanism produces faster increases than domestic political pressure alone would have delivered.
What the convergence looks like in structural terms
Wages converge across an integrated economic area through several channels: labour mobility, productivity growth, price-level catch-up, and policy decisions. All four have operated in the EU since eastern enlargement.
Labour mobility operates through workers moving from lower-wage to higher-wage member states, creating wage pressure in origin countries. Isolating this channel from productivity and price-level effects is not possible from minimum wage data alone.
Eastern EU countries have grown faster than western EU countries in GDP per worker since accession — a structural catch-up driven by capital flows, technology transfer, and labour market integration — expanding the wage base available to employers.
Price-level differences remain large. The Purchasing Power Standard (PPS) adjustments reduce the apparent wage gap substantially. €3.73 per hour buys more in Bulgaria than in Germany. The nominal catch-up documented here does not fully capture real purchasing power convergence.
The pace question
Has the catch-up been accelerating or normalizing?
For Poland, the pace accelerated sharply in 2023–2024. For Romania, the pace was front-loaded in 2018 and has moderated since. Romania’s 2026 rate of €4.79 is fractionally below its 2025 rate of €4.83, reflecting nominal stability in RON terms combined with modest exchange-rate movement. For Bulgaria, the pace has been steady and slightly increasing.
If the 2015–2020 period averaged roughly 10–12% annual increases in local currency, and the 2021–2026 period averaged higher, the directive’s adoption period coincides with a faster phase. It does not demonstrably cause it.
Poland’s trajectory is the most striking. Poland’s ratio to Germany rose from 30.8% to 47.3% between 2022 and 2026, a gain of approximately 4.1 percentage points per year. At that pace, Poland would cross the 60% threshold around 2029. This is a mechanical extrapolation only, not a forecast. The answer depends heavily on both countries’ future policy decisions, not just trend continuation.
The gap that remains
Returning to the opening frame: Bulgaria’s floor is 26.8% of Germany’s in 2026. Romania’s is 34.5%. Poland’s is 47.3%.
Even with a decade of sustained catch-up, the fastest-converging country in this group, Poland, earns less than half of Germany’s statutory floor in euro terms. For a worker at Bulgaria’s floor, the gap to a German wage-floor job represents more than a 3.7x difference in the nominal hourly rate.
The catch-up is real. The convergence is incomplete. The pace at which it continues will depend on decisions made in national capitals and in Brussels over the next decade.