The government and the unions UGT and CSIF have reached an agreement on a salary increase for officials and public servants, who will see their salaries rise by 11% between now and 2028. The main hurdle in the negotiations was the 4% backlog cap set by the executive for 2025, pending an update, and 2026, and that the union majority did not accept the consideration of a loss of purchasing power. Finally, this issue, which has been hampering the talks since Monday, has been saved by the 0.5% variable, which will be imposed next year if inflation is equal to or greater than 1.5%.
The agreement, which will be signed on Thursday, has already received the approval of the General Confederation of Workers, which ratified the decision in its Federal Council last Friday, and after a meeting lasting more than four hours, the CSIF joined. CCOO, for its part, avoided making any statement and asked for more time to make a decision. The Ministry of Public Service indicated that this agreement “represents great progress for public employees, and also guarantees the purchasing power of public employees until 2028.”
In this way, the three and a half million public sector employees will see their salaries rise by 2.5%, retroactively, for 2025, and by 1.5% for 2026, which will add 0.5%, depending on what next year’s consumer price index indicates and which will, in any case, be paid retroactively through the first quarter of 2027. At the moment, planned inflation estimates for this year are between 2.7 and 2.9%. According to the Bank of Spain’s forecast, the next rate will be around 2%.
Over the next two years, the remaining 6.5% of the 11%, which the Ministry of Public Employment last week presented as “non-transferable”, will be distributed, according to the unions, at 4.5% for 2027 and 2% for 2028.
As for the payment of the 2.5% increase for the year 2025, which will be paid retroactively, the ministry has already committed, on Monday, in the event of the success of the agreement, to submit a royal will to the Council of Ministers, allowing the payment of all these amounts throughout the month of this December.
At the end of the meeting, the Secretary General of the General Federation of Workers, Isabelle Araki, defended it as a “great agreement” that “guarantees purchasing power” and allows “a recovery of about 2.9 points.” In addition, he pointed out that “the replacement rate ends, and public job offers will be implemented within a year and the administration is ready to receive newcomers and promote existing ones.”
The two unions that committed to signing the agreement, UGT and CSIF, estimate that the 11% increase accumulated in four years, which represents a total of about 22 thousand million euros, will amount to about 11.5%, if salary transfers are taken into account.
From the CSIF, they highlight that this is “the best possible agreement in the current political conditions” and they also celebrate “improvements in terms of authorizations and reconciliation, internal promotion, merit-based competition and mobility” and in the simplification of selection processes or the abolition of the replacement rate, as well as the adaptation of job classification to real jobs and improvements in retirement, “as well as the abolition of the 35-hour ban and the regulation of telework in AGE”.
The salary increase is part of negotiations on a new multi-year agreement, until 2028, which officially began on November 5. In recent weeks, the ministry has addressed issues related to employment and working conditions with unions, where there has been good agreement, while talks on wages began last Wednesday, with an offer of 10% over four years, including the fiscal year 2025, pending an update.
Since then, communications have intensified. On Thursday the 20th, one day after the first offer, the government raised the total amount to 11%, or about 22 thousand euros in total for the entire period. These efforts satisfied the General Union of Workers, whose Federal Public Service Council approved the same afternoon. But the agreement remained stuck around the 4% accumulated between 2025 and 2026, which was set by the executive authority as a maximum, with 2.5% and 1.5%, respectively, which the CCOO and CSIF considered insufficient.