The real value of minimum wages by country in 2025

The current UK minimum wage

On April 1, 2025, the Labour government raised the UK minimum wage to £12.21 for those aged 21 and £10 for those aged 18 to 20, with Chancellor Rachel Reeves calling it “a pay rise worth an extra £1,400 per year for an eligible full-time worker.”

The efficacy of the minimum wage

Research shows that around 5.4% of low-paid workers benefit from the UK’s annual raise in minimum wage and those working for up to £2 per hour above it. However, critics say that the high cost of living still leaves minimum wage workers without the money to cover the basics.

Indeed, Amnesty International notes that there is no country with a living wage that meets the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) principles, and the debate over minimum wages is “dominated by the interests of the most wealthy and powerful in society.”

But how does the UK minimum wage stack up against the minimum wage in other countries when taking the cost of living into account?

How we used the cost of living to make a fair comparison between minimum wage levels around the world

To find out, Moorepay manually researched the current statutory minimum wage in every country using government sources and converted these figures into annual salaries. To make a fair comparison, we then converted these local salaries into international dollars using the Purchasing Power Parity conversion factors for each country. The international dollar is a hypothetical currency the World Bank uses to create a realistic comparison of the buying power of local currencies. It reflects “the comparable amount of goods and services a U.S. dollar would buy in the United States.”

Taking local purchasing power into account, the UK has the fourth-highest minimum wage in the world. An employee earning a full-time minimum wage in the UK makes a salary of £25,397, which gives an adjusted figure of INTL$36,589 in international dollars.

The Labour government raised the UK minimum wage by 6.73% in April 2025, responding to research that suggested that at the previous rate, “simply being in work may not be enough to guarantee that a family has enough income to live on.” However, the campaign for a Real Living Wage that meets the actual cost of living continues, with campaigners stating this higher alternative to the minimum wage “is voluntarily paid by over 16,000 UK businesses, who have chosen to transform millions of people’s lives and raise the bar for what decent work looks like in the UK.”

Eight of the ten countries with the most valuable minimum wage are in Europe, while the same number of African countries are among the ten with the least valuable wage. The federal minimum wage in the United States is $7.25 (£5.37), which gives a salary of $15,080 (the figure is the same in international dollars since the INTL is pegged to U.S. purchasing power). This makes the U.S. minimum wage just the 23rd most powerful in the world, ranking just below Japan and Poland and above Lithuania.

Next, we identified the five countries with the most and least valuable minimum wages. In the Netherlands, the €14.40 minimum wage translates to a full-time salary of €29,952. Accounting for local purchasing power, this gives the world’s highest effective minimum wage, at INTL$38,810. However, the FNV (Federation of Dutch Trade Unions) has argued that the Dutch minimum wage does not go far enough.

“Dutch employees are now receiving relatively less for their contribution to the economy than they did in 2014,” explained Frank van Weegberg, expert strategist at APG Asset Management. “[…] Cumulatively, wages are now about 2.5 to 4 percent behind price rises [2021-2024]. Assuming that prices will rise by about 3 percent next year, a wage increase of between 5 and 7 percent would compensate for the loss of purchasing power over the past four years.” In the event, the January 2025 minimum wage rise was just 2.78%.

The five countries where the minimum wage buys the least amount at the shops are all in Africa. In addition, the African nations of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and South Sudan have no minimum wage, and the legislation in Namibia and Zimbabwe only covers certain industries. The systems found elsewhere in Africa vary in wage level and complexity but share the characteristic of falling far short of worker needs.

“In many African countries, inflation has surged to levels unseen in decades, with double-digit price increases in 17 countries in 2022 and 19 countries in 2023,” according to an International Labour Office (ILO) report. “Rising inflation has a substantial impact on the cost of living, especially for low-income households that are heavily reliant on essential goods and services.”

Finally, Moorepay presents our data in full for you to explore and compare. For example, a search for Australia reveals that the local minimum wage works out to an annual salary of AUD$51,896. Converting this figure to U.S. dollars gives a salary of $33,810. However, since purchasing power is stronger in Australia, it has an equivalent salary in international dollars of INTL$37,895.

The minimum wage remains a matter of debate in many parts of the world, as the global cost of living crisis persists.

Amnesty International writes that “those in favour of keeping wages low have argued that stronger economic growth, often through the success of businesses is ultimately beneficial to the rights and livelihoods of working people.” The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has demonstrated that this ‘trickle-down economics’ assumption is faulty and that “an increase in the income share of the bottom 20 percent (the poor) is associated with higher GDP growth,” and “if the income share of the top 20 percent (the rich) increases, then GDP growth actually declines over the medium term.”

Methodology & Sources

We conducted manual research into the current statutory minimum wage in every country, using government sources, and converted all minimum wages to annual salaries based on the logic that a year’s work equals 2,080 working hours.

To make a fair comparison, factoring in the cost of living in each country, we then converted these figures into international dollars using the Purchasing Power Parity conversion factors for each country. As per the World Bank, the international dollar is “the comparable amount of goods and services a U.S. dollar would buy in the United States.”

The data is correct as of June 2025.