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 — from 71% of gross in Germany to 94% in Belgium.
The table below shows both. The net column is computed by running each country’s statutory minimum through that country’s 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 country’s own currency — deliberately not converted, because converting first and taxing second gets the brackets wrong.
| Country | Gross / month | Net / month | You keep |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🇧🇪 Belgium | €2,234 | €2,109 | 94.4% |
| 🇪🇸 Spain | €1,424 | €1,331 | 93.5% |
| 🇧🇷 Brazil | R$1,621 | R$1,499 | 92.5% |
| 🇪🇪 Estonia | €946 | €865 | 91.5% |
| 🇳🇱 Netherlands | €2,598 | €2,371 | 91.3% |
| 🇮🇪 Ireland | €2,391 | €2,113 | 88.4% |
| 🇵🇹 Portugal | €1,073 | €934 | 87.1% |
| 🇬🇧 United Kingdom | £2,065 | £1,780 | 86.2% |
| 🇱🇻 Latvia | €780 | €660 | 84.7% |
| 🇵🇱 Poland | PLN 4,806 | PLN 3,606 | 75.0% |
| 🇱🇹 Lithuania | €1,153 | €847 | 73.5% |
| 🇩🇪 Germany | €2,409 | €1,716 | 71.2% |
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 — try your own situation in the calculator.
The 6 countries with no statutory minimum wage
Finland, Sweden, Norway, UAE (Dubai), Switzerland, Austria 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 — it is simply set by the sector’s agreement rather than by parliament. Austria works the same way: there is no statutory minimum, and sector collective agreements (Kollektivverträge) cover almost every employee.
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.