Let’s start with bursting the bubble immediately: No, we will not have an 18% intermediate salary adjustment in summer. Sorry, but you will have to stop looking for this new villa of yours…
Of course, we are aware of the (quickly removed and no longer accessible) Politico snippet about this alleged adjustment: our inbox pays testimony to it right now. This doesn’t change reality, though. Unfortunately, we now need to give you a bit of background about salary adjustments in the EU institutions. Please bear with us.
Background
Specific intermediate salary adjustments happen somewhat regularly in places with very high inflation. These places are usually not in Europe and therefore, we do not really take note of these adjustments. They concern a small number of colleagues in delegations and are called “specific” because they apply to specific duty stations. Sometimes, they might affect a representation or agency in Europe. Technically, the correction coefficient for the specific sites changes and the sites with more staff remain unaffected.
In 2022, EU civil servants experienced for the first time in this millennium a general intermediate salary update. More-experienced colleagues tell us that this happened more often in the 1980s, but for many of us, this was the first time in their career. The difference from a “specific” update: in a general update, first salaries in Brussels and Luxembourg are updated and then Eurostat recalculates all correction coefficients all over the planet. We needed the worldwide Covid-19 crisis and the following high inflation to trigger this – so, it is unusual.
Today, we are still in the aftermath of last year’s high inflation. Many governments took action to increase the salaries of their national civil servants, be it by increasing gross salaries, adapting salary brackets or introducing specific allowances. Our salary adaption method is always lagging behind the developments in the Member States: for the ongoing and not-yet-calculated(!) yearly salary update, Eurostat will calculate the developments in the Member States from 1 July 2023 – 1 July 2024. Any potential normal salary update will be published in autumn 2024 and appear on the December 2024 payslips.
However, Eurostat asks the member states also for data to determine the need for an intermediate salary update, to deal with a situation of high inflation. Formally, an intermediate update is triggered following Art. 6 of Annex XI of the staff regulations. The trigger is a forecasted 6% increase for the full update, so for a period of 12 months. Eurostat breaks this down to a 3% increase, if only the 6-month period from July 2023 – January 2024 is considered.
The question is now: looking at the period from July 2023 – January 2024, would we receive (at least) a 3% upgrade? Well, the corresponding Eurostat report is not yet available, so we cannot say for sure. From looking at the available data, our gut feeling is that we are probably somewhere in the vicinity of 3%: it might be 2.8%, it might be 3.2%. But to be clear: a value of 18% for a general intermediate update would mean that the second half of the year 2023 had hinted at a yearly update of 36%. We don’t even need to go into details here: we would have needed a yearly inflation of 30% or more to arrive at such a number and this never happened (luckily, we might add).
The question now is: why does such a snippet appear in Politico? We cannot say for sure, but elections are coming up in a month. Draw your own conclusions for whom such headlines are helpful.
Of course, we will keep you informed once we have reliable information. In the meantime, please get in touch if you have questions.
Update: 26 April 2024, 14:45
Since the publishing of our Generation 2004 article, Politio has withdrawn its article. In the interest of transparancy, please find below the original Politico text.
SALARY BUMP FOR EU STAFF:
Feeling blue about your payslip? EU staffers can’t relate. In June, they will receive an 18 percent salary bump as part of a mega inflation-adjustment, according to an EU official directly informed of the move. The increase is a one-off, representing a half-year’s worth of smaller, monthly adjustments packed together. Typically, EU staff salaries are adjusted yearly, but with the inflation rate still high across the eurozone, wages are being revised at the mid-year mark. Still … 18 percent? That sound you just heard is thousands of Brussels bubble workers frantically googling “how do I get a job in the institutions?”
