The ECB wage tracker is the result of a Eurosystem partnership currently comprising the European Central Bank and seven euro area National Central Banks: Deutsche Bundesbank, Bank of Greece, Banco de España, Banque de France, Banca d’Italia, De Nederlandsche Bank, and Osterreichische 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 should be considered as only one of many possible sources that can help to assess wage pressures in the euro area. They are not the same as wage growth forecasts as they only indicate wage pressures that mechanically arise from the collective bargaining agreements already in place. The Eurosystem and ECB staff macroeconomic projections remain the most comprehensive assessment of the wage outlook for the euro area.
The aggregate wage tracker information published here contains three different indicators of negotiated wage growth and an indicator of employee coverage in the underlying data.
The headline “ECB wage tracker” aims to track annual growth in employees’ yearly salaries at any point in time. To achieve this, the headline wage tracker indicator includes one-off payments smoothed over the twelve months that follow each payment. This implies that any extraordinary payments or inflation compensation payments received by employees are considered in terms of the monthly salary increase this payment would imply, where the payment is smoothed over the course of one year.
The “ECB wage tracker with unsmoothed one-off payments” is the indicator most closely related with the ECB indicator of negotiated wage growth, although the series are not the same. The coverage is somewhat different: the wage tracker covers the five largest euro area countries (from January 2013), Greece (from 2016) and Austria (from 2020), while the ECB indicator of negotiated wages includes the five largest euro area countries, Austria, Belgium, Finland, and Portugal. The wage tracker includes one-off payments for Italy, which is not the case for the indicator of negotiated wages. Finally, the wage tracker is timelier and includes a forward-looking aspect that is not present in the indicator of negotiated wages. This wage tracker release is based on information available up to the end of November 2024, and it contains a forward-looking aspect up to December 2025. By contrast, the ECB indicator of negotiated wages is only available up to the third quarter of 2024, and indicators of negotiated wages using national sources can only be constructed up to September 2024. This indicator includes one-off payments when they are paid by employers. The monthly series can be considerably volatile over time, as the timing of one-off payments varies within each year and is dependent on the agreements being negotiated.
The “ECB wage tracker excluding one-off payments” is an indicator of structural wage increases that only considers permanent increases to negotiated wages, and disregards one-off payments and other bonuses.
The indicator on “employees’ coverage” is defined as the share of employees covered by collective bargaining agreements in the aggregate of participating countries. This indicator provides context on the representativeness of the wage signals for the euro area aggregate.
The coverage indicator provides an indication of the average representativeness of the wage signals stemming from the wage tracker at the euro area level proxied by the aggregate of the participating countries and within each country over time. The following table highlights this coverage as of the December 2024 Governing Council Meeting.
Employee coverage by country (employees share in each country, %)
| Germany | Greece | Spain | France | Italy | Netherlands | Austria | Euro area | |
| 2013-2023 | 42.0 | 10.0 | 52.5 | 51.6 | 48.7 | 57.9 | 58.0 | 47.4 |
| 2024 Q1 | 44.1 | 14.9 | 48.6 | 47.7 | 48.3 | 59.9 | 78.0 | 47.6 |
| 2024 Q2 | 44.4 | 14.8 | 48.3 | 47.7 | 48.1 | 60.8 | 76.1 | 47.6 |
| 2024 Q3 | 44.6 | 14.7 | 48.7 | 47.6 | 47.9 | 59.3 | 76.0 | 47.6 |
| 2024 Q4 | 43.8 | 15.5 | 48.7 | 47.7 | 46.1 | 55.5 | 74.8 | 46.8 |
| 2025 Q1 | 40.3 | 13.5 | 28.4 | 46.0 | 38.5 | 52.7 | 31.2 | 39.2 |
| 2025 Q2 | 36.2 | 9.4 | 27.7 | 36.1 | 30.3 | 47.5 | 23.5 | 33.5 |
| 2025 Q3 | 34.3 | 1.5 | 27.5 | 28.2 | 22.8 | 37.2 | 21.5 | 28.9 |
| 2025 Q4 | 32.3 | 1.1 | 27.4 | 23.6 | 22.3 | 28.2 | 17.8 | 26.4 |
Monthly.
Data are collected on an ongoing basis.
For information about the naming convention (series key dimensions and metadata), refer to the EWT underlying DSD (ECB_EWT1) maintained by the ECB.
A collective bargaining agreement is considered to be active in the wage tracker data from (1) the first date between the signing date of the agreement, the starting date of the agreement, and the date of the first wage increase in the agreement, until (2) the last date between the end date of the agreement and the date of the last non-missing wage increase plus 12 months with zero wage growth, to consider all possible base effects from the wage increases that are recorded in the active agreements.
There are two country-specific exceptions. In Italy, in addition to the previous rule, collective bargaining agreements are always set to be active at least until the last date between the expiration date of the agreement and the current cut-off date. This is because wage negotiations might take a relatively long time in Italy and are usually established for a long period of time; furthermore, expired agreements are still valid until a new agreement is reached. For France, in addition to the rule above, and because contracts need to be re-negotiated every year, but do not need to reach an agreement, the wage tracker extends with a zero wage growth during 12 months all contracts that have expired in the current year until the cut-off date for data. Because the underlying data for France is compiled at the quarterly level, as in the indicator of negotiated wages, this cut-off-date is set at the end of the relevant quarter. This approach could imply the forward-looking wage tracker methodology provides a lower bound for negotiated wage growth in France in some months, which would then be revised upwards in future updates of the data.
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 the forward-looking nature of the tracker that is dependent on the underlying collective bargaining agreements database, the wage signals should always be considered as conditional on the information available at any given point in time and are thus subject to revisions.
Revisions will be incorporated and released as part of the regular dissemination of wage tracker information.
ECB Wage Tracker
ECB calculations based on data provided by the Deutsche Bundesbank, Bank of Greece, Banco de España, Banque de France, Banca d’Italia, Oesterreichische Nationalbank, the Dutch employers’ association AWVN and Eurostat.
The main aggregate results are published in the ECB’s Data Portal eight times per year, always on Wednesday at 10:00am in the week that follows each Governing Council monetary policy meeting and the associated press conference.
Download the series catalogue containing a full list of series and associated metadata of the dataset EWT in CSV format (zipped)