In the May 11 election campaign, Prime Minister Edi Rama started the race with a promising figure for citizens: 500 euros. This is what the minimum wage in Albania will be, according to him, until 2026.
The first step towards fulfilling this promise is the approval of the decision by the Council of Ministers.
“In June, we will raise the minimum wage to 500 euros and it will come into effect from January 2026,” Prime Minister Rama announced shortly before the elections, adding that this increase will occur without imposing “any additional taxes” on businesses in the first 18 months. An easy and understandable promise for all voters.
But two months after the May 11 elections, when the smoke from the electoral fireworks has cleared, Faktoje decided to verify whether any concrete steps have been taken towards fulfilling this promise.
To get an answer, we sent a request for information to the Council of Ministers, to understand whether the decision, announced to be made in June, has been approved.
The answer came clearly and briefly: "So far, there has been no approved act regarding the increase in the minimum wage to 500 euros."
So until the end of July, the promise remains only in the archive of the prime minister's speeches.
Increasing the minimum wage is a repeated promise of the prime minister, who before the 2023 local elections said that the minimum wage would reach 450 euros. This promise was not kept and the minimum wage is still around 400 euros today.
The 2025 parliamentary elections brought a new opportunity to use the minimum wage as an electoral card. The promise, this time for 500 euros, has so far remained (as often happens in Albanian politics), an enthusiastic chapter of the election campaign, which seems not to have yet made it into the administration's papers.
The deadline mentioned by the Prime Minister (January 2026) can still be met. But so far, the promised official acts are missing. For this reason, we consider the Prime Minister's promise to approve the decision on the minimum wage of 500 euros in June to be unfulfilled. /Taken from Faktoje.al
