Press release No. 071 of 1 March 2016
WIESBADEN – As reported by the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), the monthly index of agreed hourly earnings, excluding extra payments, rose by 2.6% in the period from December 2014 to February 2016. The Minimum Wage Commission has decided that it will use this indicator as the basis for the first adjustment of the statutory minimum wage as of 1 January 2017. For its resolution, which has to be announced by 30 June 2016 at the latest, the Commission will use the rate of change in the index time series from December 2014 to the time of the resolution.
Together with the introduction of the statutory minimum wage in Germany from 1 January 2015, the Federal Government established a standing Minimum Wage Commission, one of whose tasks is to pass a resolution every two years in respect of adjusting the minimum wage. The relevant legal act prescribes that the Commission shall subsequently be guided by collective wage developments. The Commission has decided that it will normally base minimum wage adjustments from 2018 onwards on the development of collectively agreed wages in the two preceding calendar years.
Detailed methodological information on the agreed earnings indices of the Federal Statistical Office is given in the methodological paper (only in german) on these statistics. The complete range of results of the monthly agreed earnings index is available in the Monthly index of agreed earnings table (62231-0001) of the GENESIS-Online database. As before, the quarterly results are additionally published in a press release.