5 November 2025

• ECB wage tracker updated with wage agreements signed up to the beginning of October 2025; forward-looking horizon extended to end-September 2026
• Forward-looking information continues to indicate easing of negotiated wage growth
• Preliminary data for first three quarters of 2026 suggest lower and more stable wage growth, with employee coverage remaining limited

The latest reading of the European Central Bank (ECB) wage tracker, which covers active collective bargaining agreements, indicates negotiated wage growth with smoothed one-off payments of 4.7% in 2024 (based on a coverage of 50.6% of employees in participating countries) and 3.2% in 2025 (based on a coverage of 48.7%). The wage tracker with unsmoothed one-off payments indicates negotiated wage growth of 4.9% in 2024 and 3.0% in 2025. The downward trend in the forward-looking wage tracker component partly reflects the mechanical impact of large one-off payments (that were made in 2024 but not in 2025) and the frontloaded nature of wage increases in some sectors in 2024. The wage tracker excluding one-off payments indicates growth of 4.2% in 2024 and 3.9% in 2025.

For the third quarter of 2026, the headline wage tracker stands at 2.2% (up from 1.8% in the first half of 2026), the wage tracker with unsmoothed one-off payments also stands at 2.2% (down from 2.5% in the first half of 2026), and the wage tracker excluding one-off payments stands at 2.4% (down from 2.6% in the first half of 2026). The employee coverage for the third quarter of 2026 stands at just 19.4%, compared with 31.0% for the first half of 2026 and 47.2% for the fourth quarter of 2025. See Chart 1 and Table 1 for further details.

Since the previous data release in September 2025, one-off payments for Belgium and Austria have been included and the forward-looking horizon has been extended to the end of September 2026.

Overall, the ECB wage tracker may be subject to revisions, and the forward-looking component should not be interpreted as a forecast, as it only captures the information that is available for active collective bargaining agreements. Moreover, the wage tracker does not follow the indicator of negotiated wage growth precisely and deviations are to be expected over time. For a more comprehensive assessment of wage developments in the euro area, please refer to the September 2025 ECB staff macroeconomic projections for the euro area, which indicate a yearly growth rate of compensation per employee in the euro area of 3.4% for 2025 and 2.7% for 2026.

The ECB publishes four wage tracker indicators for the aggregate of eight participating euro area countries on the ECB Data Portal. The data release following the December 2025 Governing Council will be published exceptionally on 19 December 2025.

Chart 1

ECB wage tracker: forward-looking signals for negotiated wages and revisions to previous data release

Indicators between January 2024 and September 2026	Revisions to previous data release
(left-hand scale: yearly growth rates, percentages; right-hand scale: percentage share of employees)	(percentage points)

• The headline ECB wage tracker is a tracker of negotiated wage growth that includes collectively agreed one-off payments (related for example to inflation compensation, bonuses or back-dated pay) which are smoothed over 12 months.
• The ECB wage tracker excluding one-off payments reflects the extent of structural (or permanent) negotiated wage increases.
• The ECB wage tracker with unsmoothed one-off payments is constructed on the basis of a methodology that, in terms of both data sources and statistical methodology, is conceptually similar to, but not necessarily the same as, that used for the indicator of negotiated wage growth.
• The share of employees covered is the percentage of employees across the participating countries that are directly covered by ECB wage tracker data. This indicator provides information on the representativeness of the signals on negotiated wage growth obtained from the set of wage tracker indicators for the aggregate of the participating countries. Employee coverage differs across countries and within each country over time (more details can be found in Table 2).

For media queries, please contact Benoit Deeg, tel.: +491721683704

Notes:

• The ECB wage tracker is the result of a Eurosystem partnership currently comprising the European Central Bank and eight euro area national central banks: the Nationale Bank van België/Banque Nationale de Belgique, the Deutsche Bundesbank, the Bank of Greece, the Banco de España, the Banque de France, the Banca d’Italia, De Nederlandsche Bank and the Oesterreichische Nationalbank. It is based on a highly granular database of active collective bargaining agreements for Belgium, Germany, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria. The wage tracker is one of many possible sources that can help assess wage pressures in the euro area.
• The wage tracker methodology uses a double aggregation approach. First, it aggregates the highly granular information on collective bargaining agreements and constructs the wage tracker indicators at the country level using information on the employee coverage for each country. Second, it uses this information to construct the aggregate for the euro area using time-varying weights based on the total compensation of employees for the participating countries.
• Given that the forward-looking nature of the tracker is dependent on the underlying collective bargaining agreements database, the wage signals should always be considered conditional on the information available at any given point in time and thus subject to revisions.
• The results in this press release do not represent the views of the ECB’s decision-making bodies.