Why is unrealistic to believe that the average salary in Serbia is EUR 1,000?
President Aleksandar Vučić hurried last Tuesday, a day before the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia (RZS), to be the first to deliver the good news to citizens that the average salary in December exceeded 1,000 euros for the first time in history, and announced that between 6 and 10 March he would present to them a supposedly new “comprehensive and extremely complicated” development plan, called Serbia 2030–2035.
Instead of the prime minister, the president – who is not formally responsible for such matters – had previously announced similar “plans”, which the Government in fact never formally adopted. The first time was in December 2019, when he promoted the alleged plan “Serbia 2025”; in January 2024, he presented its 2.0 version, “Leap into the Future – Serbia 2027”; and soon he will present a third one, “Serbia 2030–2035”. It remains to be seen how many tens of billions of euros the authorities plan to invest in major projects this time and what salaries they will promise employees if the SNS remains in power for another five or ten years.
The day after someone apparently “whispered” the information to the president so that he could inform citizens first, the RZS officially announced that the average net salary in December amounted to 124,089 dinars, or 1,057 euros. In the same statement, however, it also noted that the median net wage, received by more than half of employees, was 90,819 dinars, or slightly less than 774 euros. Evidently, none of the officials found that information attractive enough, so it was simply ignored.
Nowhere are salaries of 1,400 euros
This is quite logical, considering that almost 1.2 million people – or every second of the 2.32 million formally employed in Serbia – will have to wait at least another three years before their salaries exceed the “dream threshold” of 1,000 euros. Even if their wages grow twice as fast as the 5.1 per cent increase introduced in the public sector on 1 January, their average would rise to 853 euros this year, to 940 euros next year, and would only reach 1,036 euros in 2028. If their salaries were to grow by 5.1 per cent this year and in the following years, they would not reach that thousand-euro mark even by 2030.
Finance Minister Siniša Mali certainly knows this. That may also be one of the reasons why, less than ten months before 2027, neither he nor President Vučić mention as often the promise that the average salary would reach 1,400 euros as early as next year. It is as if they are satisfied with the fact that the “dream threshold” of 1,000 euros has just been crossed.
Or perhaps they too have realised that during the first eleven months of this year the average salary will more or less remain at that level and that in September, October or November this year it will not be significantly higher than it was last December. Such forecasts do not require a crystal ball, but only a cursory analysis of official data – the same data that the RZS provides to the president a day before everyone else.
Those databases clearly show that in December 2023, the average net salary was 95,093 dinars and that during the following eleven months it increased nominally by only 2.2 per cent, to 97,215 dinars. Or that in December 2022 employees in Serbia received 84,227 dinars, after which they had to make do until November the following year with an average that was higher by only 1.1 per cent, amounting to 85,175 dinars. Although they had somewhat more dinars in their pockets, their purchasing power during those eleven months was actually lower than in December of the previous year, because consumer prices in the meantime had increased by 7.5 per cent, while food and non-alcoholic beverages rose by 8.2 per cent.
“Anomaly” or unwritten rule
An additional problem is that since 2019, the average salary in December has been higher than the average for the following eleven months in as many as four cases. Specifically, in December 2019 employees earned on average 59,772 dinars, while during the following eleven months they received 257 dinars less. That this was not an exception but almost a rule is confirmed by the fact that the average salary in December 2020 was 1,034 dinars higher than during the period from January to November 2021. It should not be forgotten that in 2020 the crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic was at its peak and that Serbia’s GDP that year fell in real terms by one per cent.
That this “anomaly” is not merely one of the consequences of increasingly frequent crises can be seen from the fact that the same situation occurred twice more: the average salary in December 2021 was 551 dinars higher than during the following eleven months, and in the last month of 2024 it was 173 dinars lower than the average from January to November of that year.
All this indicates that there is little chance that by December this year the average salary will be significantly higher than 1,057 euros. And if the beginning of the year is any indication, it is not impossible that in some months it might even be lower. This is especially likely given that industrial production in January was 9.1 per cent lower than in the same month last year and as much as 14.4 per cent below last year’s average. This decline was largely caused by producers of coke and refined petroleum products, food products, chemicals and chemical products, computers, electronic and optical products, as well as basic pharmaceutical products and preparations. It would therefore be quite surprising if employees in those sectors received more money in January than they did in December.
Teachers again lag behind the average
A more detailed analysis of income by sector also points to deeper structural problems. On Monday at the Kopaonik Business Forum, Minister Mali announced that increased spending on education and artificial intelligence would form an integral part of the new “Serbia 2030–2035” plan. However, official data certainly do not work in favour of either him, the Minister of Education Dejan Vuk Stanković, or especially President Vučić, as they show that education has not been particularly high on the list of priorities for the current authorities in recent years.
If that were not the case, education employees would not have received 11,390 dinars, or almost 100 euros, less than the national average in December. Teachers once went on strike demanding that their salaries at least be equal to the national average. Clearly, that will not happen by the end of this year either, even though in November, during an appearance on the television programme Ćirilica, Vučić stated that “education workers, despite dissatisfaction among some employees in the sector, have received significant salary increases since the beginning of the year and will by the end of the year have a cumulative increase of as much as 28.6 per cent”.
However, it later turned out that this figure also included this year’s 5.1 per cent increase, because the average net salary in education rose between December 2024 and December 2025 from 92,420 to 112,699 dinars, or by 21.9 per cent. Although their wages grew faster in nominal terms than those of others, teachers still received about ten per cent less than the average of all employees in December, and they lag even further behind their colleagues in state administration and public enterprises owned by the Republic of Serbia, by 13,291 and 21,665 dinars respectively. Given that salaries in the entire public sector were increased by the same percentage in January, they will continue to fall behind. This is despite the fact that the former prime minister and current Speaker of the National Assembly stated on 30 January last year that “the special collective agreement signed with representatives of representative education unions ensures that the starting salary of an education worker will never again be below the national average”.
Vojvodina behind by 640 euros
Considering all this, it is understandable that representatives of the authorities highlight data for three Belgrade municipalities – Stari Grad, Vračar and Novi Beograd – which top the ranking with average salaries exceeding 200,000 dinars. For entirely different reasons they do not mention that salaries in Vojvodina are 6,276 dinars lower than the national average, even though during the former Yugoslavia the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina ranked immediately behind Slovenia and Croatia in terms of wages.
Now, however, residents of Vojvodina receive 640 euros less per year than their colleagues in central Serbia. Many of them earn far less, particularly in municipalities where the average salary has still not reached 100,000 dinars. These include Apatin, Kula, Odžaci, Bela Crkva, Kovačica, Opovo, Bač, Bački Petrovac, Srbobran, Titel, Ada, Čoka, Bačka Topola, Mali Iđoš, Žitište, Nova Crnja, Novi Bečej, Sečanj and Irig.
Average salaries below 100,000 dinars are also recorded in Arilje, Bajina Bašta, Nova Varoš, Priboj, Sjenica, Čajetina, Mionica, Krupanj, Loznica, Ivanjica, Jagodina, Despotovac, Svilajnac, Ćuprija, Aleksandrovac, Varvarin, Trstenik, Ćićevac, Vrnjačka Banja, Novi Pazar, Raška, Batočina, Knić, Lapovo, Rača, Topola, Veliko Gradište, Žabari, Kučevo, Knjaževac, Sokobanja, Leskovac, Niška Banja, Aleksinac, Babušnica, Bela Palanka, Velika Plana, Smederevska Palanka, Vranje, Vranjska Banja, Vladičin Han, Surdulica, Trgovište, Prokuplje, Žitorađa and Kuršumlija.
Residents of Golubac, Osečina, Bogatić and Petrovac na Mlavi earn only a few hundred dinars more than 90,000, while incomes in Prijepolje, Vlasotince, Koceljeva, Rekovac, Tutin, Malo Crniće, Bojnik, Lebane, Crna Trava, Gadžin Han, Doljevac, Merošina, Ražanj, Svrljig, Bosilegrad, Bujanovac and Blace fall below that threshold. By far the lowest average salary is in Preševo, amounting to just 78,411 dinars, or less than 668 euros.
New target, new distance
Minister Mali also played the card of selective memory when he stated at the Kopaonik Business Forum, before nearly 1,500 businesspeople and bankers, that the authorities had fulfilled everything they had promised. As an example, he mentioned that in December 2019, the average salary exceeded 500 euros for the first time. Presumably hoping that no one would remember that Vučić, then prime minister, first promised a 500-euro salary as early as Christmas 2016. At that time, he claimed that it would be achieved by the end of 2017, then in November of that year, he moved the deadline to the end of 2018, and so on. Finally, in December 2019, he proudly announced that the average salary that month had reached 508 euros, largely thanks to the Government’s decision to raise public sector salaries in December 2019 instead of January 2020.
Of course, none of the officials thought to comment a few months later, when in February 2020 the average briefly slipped to 494 euros, nor to point out that from the beginning of that year until the end of November it averaged 506 euros – three euros less than in December 2019. That is precisely why it is not impossible that we will watch a repeat of the same story this year, regardless of what the new “Serbia 2030–2035” scenario presented by Vučić and Mali in the coming days will look like.
That is also why the informal prime minister Vučić and his chief treasurer Siniša Mali need a new strategy – Serbia 2030, or even better Serbia 2035. When they present it in a few days’ time, they will be able to move the horizon five or ten years further ahead. And who will remember what they promised at the beginning of March 2026?
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