The European Central Bank has published an updated ECB wage tracker covering active collective bargaining agreements, incorporating agreements signed up to the beginning of October 2025 and extending the forward-looking component to end-September 2026. The updated readings continue to indicate easing negotiated wage growth, with preliminary signals for the first three quarters of 2026 pointing to lower and more stable growth, though with limited employee coverage. The headline tracker (one-off payments smoothed) shows negotiated wage growth of 4.7% in 2024 and 3.2% in 2025, while the version with unsmoothed one-off payments shows 4.9% in 2024 and 3.0% in 2025; excluding one-off payments, the tracker indicates 4.2% growth in 2024 and 3.9% in 2025. For the third quarter of 2026, the headline and unsmoothed indicators stand at 2.2% and the indicator excluding one-off payments at 2.4%; the employee coverage for that quarter is 19.4%, down from 47.2% in the fourth quarter of 2025. Since the previous release in September 2025, one-off payments for Belgium and Austria have been included; the ECB also notes the tracker is subject to revisions and that forward-looking signals should not be interpreted as a forecast because they only reflect information in active agreements. The ECB publishes four wage tracker indicators for eight participating euro area countries on the ECB Data Portal, with the release following the December 2025 Governing Council published exceptionally on 19 December 2025.

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