The European Central Bank published an updated wage tracker covering active collective bargaining agreements signed up to end-November 2025 and extended the forward-looking horizon to end-December 2026. The tracker’s forward-looking signals point to easing negotiated wage growth in 2026, consistent with the information released after the October 2025 Governing Council meeting. The headline ECB wage tracker, which smooths collectively agreed one-off payments over 12 months, shows negotiated wage growth of 3.2% in 2025 (49.5% employee coverage across participating countries) and 2.3% in 2026 (28.8% coverage). Alternative measures show 3.0% in 2025 and 2.7% in 2026 when one-off payments are not smoothed, and an easing from 3.9% in 2025 to 2.6% in 2026 when one-off payments are excluded. For 2026, the headline path rises from 2.0% in the first quarter to 2.7% in the fourth quarter, reflecting the fading mechanical downward effect from large one-off payments made in 2024 but not in 2025; the release also notes less dispersion in negotiated wage pressures across euro area countries in 2026 than in previous years. Since the prior release, the database has been expanded to include Finnish collective agreements retroactively from January 2015. The ECB notes the tracker is subject to revisions and that its forward-looking component should not be interpreted as a forecast, as it only reflects currently available information on active agreements and may deviate from the indicator of negotiated wage growth over time. For broader context, it points to the December 2025 Eurosystem staff projections showing compensation per employee growth of 4.0% in 2025 and 3.2% in 2026.

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