New data release: ECB wage tracker continues to indicate that negotiated wage pressures will ease over the course of the year

23 April 2025

• ECB wage tracker updated with agreements signed up to first week of April 2025
• Forward-looking information suggests negotiated wage pressures will ease overall in 2025, consistent with data published following March Governing Council meeting

The European Central Bank wage tracker, which covers active collective bargaining agreements, indicates negotiated wage growth with smoothed one-off payments of 4.8% in 2024 (based on an average coverage of 48.8% of employees in participating countries), and 3.1% in 2025 (based on an average coverage of 46.5%). The ECB wage tracker with unsmoothed one-off payments indicates average negotiated wage growth level of 4.9% in 2024 and 2.8% in 2025. The steeply downward trend of the forward-looking wage tracker in 2025 partly reflects the mechanical impact of large one-off payments (that were paid in 2024 but drop out 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 3.8% in 2025. See Chart 1 and Table 1 for further details.

The ECB wage tracker may be subject to revisions, and the forward-looking part should not be interpreted as a forecast as it only captures information in active collective bargaining agreements. For a more comprehensive assessment of wage developments in the euro area, please refer to the March 2025 ECB staff macroeconomic projections for the euro area, which indicate a yearly growth rate of compensation per employee in the euro area of 4.6% in 2024 and 3.4% in 2025, with a quarterly profile for 2025 of 3.8% in the first quarter, 3.7% in the second quarter, 3.4% in the third quarter and 2.8% in the fourth quarter.

The ECB publishes four wage tracker indicators for the aggregate of seven participating euro area countries via the ECB Data Portal.

Chart 1

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

2023-25	Revisions to previous data release
(left-hand scale: yearly growth rates, percentages; right-hand scale: percentage share of employees)	(percentage points)

What do the four different indicators show?

• The headline ECB wage tracker shows negotiated wage growth that includes collectively agreed one-off payments, such as those related 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 using a methodology that, both in terms of data sources and statistical methodology, is conceptually similar to, but not necessarily the same as, the one used for the ECB 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 underlying (negotiated) wage growth signals obtained from the set of wage tracker indicators for the aggregate of participating countries. Employee coverage differs across countries and within each country over time (more details are provided in Table 2).

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Notes:

• The ECB wage tracker is the result of a Eurosystem partnership currently comprising the ECB and seven euro area national central banks: 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 Germany, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria. The wage tracker is one of many 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 among 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.