The average real salary today is worth 140 euros less than in 2020

2026-01-05 11:02:00, Ekonomi CNA

Have you noticed that even though you may receive more money, at the end of the month you always end up with less and less?!

Rising food and rent prices are eroding the real value of income, especially from wages.

INSTAT data showed that in the third quarter the average real gross salary was 69,630 lek or 16.4 percent lower than the average nominal salary of 83,300 lek in the same period.

The real wage due to inflation effects is 140 euros lower than the nominal wage in June-September 2025.

The real average gross monthly salary has been indexed to inflation (2020=100) by INSTAT. This means that with about 83 thousand lek, an Albanian buys today the same goods that in 2020 they bought with about 70 thousand lek.

The average nominal gross monthly salary in Albania from 2014 to 2025 has increased significantly, but has not been accompanied to the same extent by an improvement in the real purchasing power of employees, on the contrary.

Nominal and real wages had balanced differences before the pandemic, but then the gap widened due to rising prices, especially in rent and food.

The nominal wage increased significantly, from around 60 thousand lek in 2022 to over 83 thousand lek in 2024 and early 2025. However, the real wage is growing much more slowly and in some quarters even declines compared to the nominal wage rate. The ratio of real wage to nominal wage is falling steadily, falling from around 94% in early 2022 to around 83–83% in 2024–2025. This indicates that an increasingly large part of wage growth is being eroded by inflation.

Although workers receive much higher nominal wages today than they did a decade ago, the real purchasing power of these wages has deteriorated significantly in recent years. Higher wages have failed to compensate for rising prices, leaving the real benefit to workers lower than the nominal increase in income suggests.

The gap between real and nominal wages is widening because their growth did not come from productivity in the economy, but from labor pressures. The increase in wages by decisions further stimulated price increases, actually reducing the real value of wages./ Monitor