Average annual pay per employee in the EU rose to €41,500 in 2025 after part-time pay was adjusted to a full-time basis. Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical office, published the annual figures on 6 November 2026. It put the 2024 average at €39,800. The 4.3% rise is in nominal terms, so the figures alone do not show how much more employees could buy with their pay.
Key facts
- The EU’s full-time adjusted average rose from €39,800 in 2024 to €41,500 in 2025.
- Luxembourg led the published country figures at €85,600.
- Eurostat adjusts part-time pay to a full-time basis. It points to separate figures for the Netherlands, which uses a different method.
How far apart were the country figures?
Eurostat put Luxembourg, Denmark and Ireland at the top of its comparable national figures. Bulgaria and Greece were at the bottom. The table shows the three highest and two lowest values in the release. The values use the same reference year and unit.
| Country | Full-time adjusted annual salary in 2025, euros |
|---|---|
| Luxembourg | 85,600 |
| Denmark | 73,500 |
| Ireland | 64,400 |
| Greece | 18,800 |
| Bulgaria | 16,200 |
The rounded figures for Luxembourg and Bulgaria were €69,400 apart. That gap is the difference between two national averages in euros at current prices. A comparison based on purchasing power would answer a different question by taking price differences between countries into account. The release does provide two years on the same basic definition for tracking the change in pay across the EU over time.
Why does Germany’s national earnings figure look different?
Eurostat combines national accounts figures with data on working hours from the Labour Force Survey. Its methodology starts by dividing total gross wages and salaries by the number of employees. It then uses working hours to adjust the figure to a full-time basis. That helps prevent a country with a large part-time workforce from appearing to have lower pay simply because employees work fewer hours. The size of the adjustment depends on working patterns. The resulting amount is a statistical estimate on a full-time basis.
Germany’s Federal Statistical Office answered a different question in April. It looked at gross annual earnings among people who actually worked full time in Germany, including special payments. The median for 2025 was €54,066. Half of the employees in that group earned at least that amount. The arithmetic mean for the same group was €64,441, up from €62,235 in 2024. Particularly high earners pull up the mean. The distribution shows how far earnings vary around that average. The bottom 10% of full-time employees earned €33,828 or less, while the top 10% earned €100,719 or more, before tax.
The Destatis analysis covers only full-time employees who worked at least seven months during the reporting year. Gross earnings for part-year employment were scaled to twelve months, and taxable special payments such as holiday or Christmas bonuses were included. The median was €46,013 in eastern Germany excluding Berlin, compared with €55,435 in western Germany. That €9,422 difference comes from the same national earnings survey, not from Eurostat's full-time-adjusted country comparison.
The distinction matters when using the figures to put German earnings in context. The Destatis distribution gives a full-time worker a benchmark against employees with the same working-time status. The Eurostat series is designed for comparing pay across European countries after allowing for differences in hours. According to the methodology, Eurostat updates the indicator once a year in the autumn, after receiving the national accounts data. That update can also revise figures for earlier years.
