Yolanda Díaz will chair this week the act in which the experts’ report on the interprofessional minimum wage (SMI) will be delivered, which provides for an increase of 3.1% if it is not imposed and 4.7% if it is imposed. To arrive at these figures, the commission starts from the 2022 Salary Structure Survey and updates this data with other more recent salary statistics, a criterion which is not shared by the 12 participating experts. It was the representatives of the Ministry of Hacienda and Economy, who drafted a discordant vote that allowed access to the country. Consider that the report unjustifiably ignores the most recent data on average gross salary published by the INE, collected in the Encuesta Anual de Estructura Salarial de 2023. The work defends the method chosen by the commission and charges against the ministries led by Carlos Cuerpo and María Jesús Montero.
“We do not understand how it is exclusively experts in economics and sciences who question the use of this method approved by other professors and academics before them,” say the sources of the Ministry of Labor. This count does not include union experts, only union representatives. “This position,” said the Díaz department, “is in front of the scientific and academic consensus,” before going further: “It aligns with the employer in front of the scientific consensus.” Since the Ministry of Hacienda and Economy limits itself to affirming that the disagreement is purely methodological and that it shares the main criterion: the convenience of increasing the interprofessional minimum wage.
The work must be “absolutely respectful” of the work of the experts and experts who “are the committee which understood that it must use a certain method”. “Decisions are made on solid and rigorous bases and with an irreproachable trajectory on the part of everyone,” adds Trabajo. The ministry emphasizes that “it does not influence” the committee of experts, “which is of academic extraction and makes its own decisions”. Hacienda y Economía does not measure how much the minimum wage would increase with its methodological proposal. The authors of the divergent vote are Francisco Javier Muñoz (general director of Economic Policy and representative of the Ministry of Economy) and César Veloso (deputy director of the Office of the First Vice President of the Government and Minister of the Hacienda).
The dissent focuses on the starting point, whether it begins in the 2022 survey or the 2023 survey. The majority of the commission opted for the former as more comprehensive. According to statistics experts not participating in this working group, the date of 2022 offers more information than that of 2023. However, they do not have exactly the same name: the first is the Encuesta de Estructura Salarial (EES), of a quadrennial nature and which is carried out in all countries of the European Union, and the second is the Annual Salary Structure Survey (EAES), with less information and without community replication.
In the divergent vote, the representatives of Economy and Hacienda argue that the EAES is specifically designed to ensure statistical continuity with the quarterly survey and affirm that it is part of a single official series published by the INE. Therefore, I think its exclusion is not justified from a technical point of view. They also assert that the absence of microdata in the EAES is not decisive in this debate.
Hacienda and economic experts say the path taken by the commission introduces an error by ignoring observed data (from the 2023 EAES) and replacing it with an indirect estimate. And emphasize that microdata are available upon request from the Commission to the Tax Agency. The private vote also indicates that the 2023 statistics do not have lower quality or consistency compared to lower annual data and which the European Commission used as a reference in different estimates. I believe that questioning its relevance introduces an unnecessary and difficult to justify methodological inconsistency.
The representatives of Economics and Hacienda conclude by considering that the methodology adopted in the report is not the most appropriate from a technical point of view and criticize the fact that it affects the robustness of the final result. He draws this conclusion by considering that an estimate of the average salary is less precise than the use of the EAES would allow.
In the latest report, which served as the basis for the 2025 increase, experts participated in the 2022 Salary Structure Survey and predicted the increase figures using two formulas: they used the Quarterly Labor Cost Survey (TCLS) to calculate the net average salary corresponding to 2024, estimating annual growth rates; and on the other hand, they will use the ETCL again and calculate the growth rates for the annual average 2022-23 and using mobile media for the period from the third quarter 2023 to 2024. Knowledge of the methodology of this year indicates that it is possible to resort to the ETCL to estimate the increments of recent years.
Despite these internal differences, Economy does not reject the existence of this committee of experts. “The technical work of the group of experts is a valuable contribution, whose proposals must give space to social dialogue in determining the SMI,” said the minister.
This year’s committee members are Begoña Cueto (rapporteur and professor at the University of Oviedo), Elena Bárcena (University of Málaga), Javier Muñoz (general director of economic policy and representative of the Ministry of Economy), Luis Ayala (UGT), Alberto del Pozo (UGT), Libertad González (Pompeu Fabra University);
The entrepreneurs, voluntarily, do not participate in the expert committee and question their recommendations. This working group also recommends increases in 2025, 2023 and 2022, but not in 2024. This will be the fourth expert report.
Asked about the future increase in the SMI, the team said in Brussels: “We must also guarantee, in addition to these increases, that the minimum wage will not lose purchasing power in the future, so it can be increased in line with inflation.” It thus underlines the importance of the increase in salaries which has increased by 61% since 2018 – from 736 to 1,184 euros gross per month in 14 payments in 2025 -.
With information from Pablo Semperé Yes Manuel V. Gomez.
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