The gross statutory minimum wage is easy to look up and tells you less than you would think. What a minimum-wage worker actually receives depends on how their country taxes the lowest incomes, and that varies far more than the headline figures do โ from 72% of gross in Germany to 97% in Netherlands.
The table below shows both. The net column is computed by running each countryโs statutory minimum through that countryโs own tax rules in our engine, for a single employee with no dependants, on the 2026 figures.
Statutory minimum wage, gross and net
Sorted by how much of the gross the worker keeps. Each figure is a monthly amount in the countryโs own currency โ deliberately not converted, because converting first and taxing second gets the brackets wrong.
| Country | Gross / month | Net / month | You keep |
|---|---|---|---|
| ๐ณ๐ฑ Netherlands | โฌ2,133 | โฌ2,065 | 96.8% |
| ๐ง๐ท Brazil | R$1,621 | R$1,499 | 92.5% |
| ๐ช๐ช Estonia | โฌ946 | โฌ865 | 91.5% |
| ๐ง๐ช Belgium | โฌ2,070 | โฌ1,879 | 90.8% |
| ๐ช๐ธ Spain | โฌ1,424 | โฌ1,282 | 90.1% |
| ๐ฎ๐ช Ireland | โฌ2,281 | โฌ2,032 | 89.1% |
| ๐ต๐น Portugal | โฌ870 | โฌ774 | 89.0% |
| ๐ฌ๐ง United Kingdom | ยฃ2,075 | ยฃ1,787 | 86.1% |
| ๐ฑ๐ป Latvia | โฌ780 | โฌ660 | 84.7% |
| ๐ฆ๐น Austria | โฌ2,000 | โฌ1,628 | 81.4% |
| ๐ต๐ฑ Poland | PLNย 4,806 | PLNย 3,606 | 75.0% |
| ๐ฑ๐น Lithuania | โฌ1,153 | โฌ847 | 73.5% |
| ๐ฉ๐ช Germany | โฌ2,222 | โฌ1,609 | 72.4% |
Single employee, no dependants, no regional variation applied. A worker with children usually keeps more, because dependant allowances and credits bite hardest at low incomes โ try your own situation in the calculator.
The 5 countries with no statutory minimum wage
Finland, Sweden, Norway, UAE (Dubai), Switzerland appear with no figure above, and that is not missing data. They have no national statutory minimum wage at all.
In the Nordic countries this is a deliberate feature of the labour model rather than a gap. Pay floors are set by collective agreements negotiated sector by sector between unions and employer organisations, and coverage is high enough that a statutory minimum would add little. The practical effect is that a Swedish or Finnish minimum in, say, hospitality is a real and enforceable number โ it is simply set by the sectorโs agreement rather than by parliament.
Switzerland has no federal minimum, though several cantons have introduced their own by referendum, some of them among the highest in the world. The UAE has no general statutory minimum wage for private sector workers.
For those countries the calculator has no minimum-wage preset, and the lowest figures on their pages are illustrative rather than statutory.
How to read these numbers
- A high retention rate is not generosity. Countries that shield minimum-wage earners from tax often do so with a large personal allowance that tapers away. The relief is real at the bottom and disappears quickly.
- Compare purchasing power, not currency. A minimum wage is best judged against local rent and food prices. Our country pages include cost-of-living context for this reason.
- Watch the payment count. Where a country pays 14 monthly instalments, the annual minimum is higher than twelve times the monthly figure.
- Minimums move annually. Most are revised each January, several are indexed to inflation automatically, and the figures here are dated at the top of the page.
For the mechanics of the deductions behind the net column, see the gross-to-net guide and the social security guide.