Collective wages rose 5.5% in the first quarter of 2025

Collective bargaining wages increased by 5.5 percent in the first quarter compared to a year earlier, Statistics Netherlands (CBS) reported on Thursday. Wage increases have been slowing down since peaking at 6.9 percent in the third quarter of 2024. Adjusted for inflation, wages increased by 1.8 percent in the first quarter, CBS said.

Collective labor agreement wages increased the most in the private sector at 5.7 percent and the least in the government sector at 4.7 percent. In subsidised institutions, wages rose by 5.4 percent, though CBS pointed out that this figure was incomplete as many healthcare collective agreements that fall under this category have not yet been finalized. Only 41 percent of collective labor agreements in the subsidised sector had been finalized by the end of the first quarter.

The biggest wage increase happened in the information and communication sector. Here, collective wages were 9.6 percent higher than in the first quarter of 2024. In the other services sector, which includes textile carers, hairdressers, and funeral services, wages rose by 8.8 percent. The increase was the smallest in the real estate sector, where wages remained the same. A year earlier, this sector had the highest wage increase.

Adjusted for inflation, collective wages increased by 1.8 percent in the first quarter. “The real wage development has been declining for four consecutive quarters,” CBS said.

Trade unions pushed for big wage increases to compensate for high inflation in 2022 and 2023. The real wage development was negative in both those years, reaching a low point in the last quarter of 2022. Then, collective wages increased by 3.7 percent, but due to the high inflation at the time, workers actually had less to spend (-6.1 percent).

Workers started feeling their wage increases in their wallets again from the last quarter of 2023. After the third quarter of 2024, wage increases started to level out and decrease.