How do the wages of Croatian workers evolve over the years? Are workers getting more or less paid? Is wage inequality rising or falling?

Every month the Croatian bureau of statistics (DZS) publishes numbers about the wages of people employed in the Republic of Croatia. This publication comes with a summary filled with an Adriatic sea of useless sentences that HINA turns into a press release which is mindlessly republished by Croatian mass media without further comment or analysis.

No good insight on what is happening to the wages of Croatian workers can be gathered from these numbers. The ‘pretty’ graphics you find on the DZS dashboard are, until at least august 2025, not more useful.

Let us try to find better insights. But before that, it is useful to understand what is problematic with the DZS summaries:

  1. They mostly focus on the average wage. The average wage is not a robust statistic. It is sensitive to outliers: very high or low wages. Only the highest paid workers may get paid more and the average wage will go up. If you want to know how much the average worker earns, just forget about the average wage. A more interesting number to look at is the median wage: half of the workers earn less than that and the other half more than that. Otherwise said it is the minimal amount that half of the workers get.

  2. They compare nominal (not compensated by inflation) wages values at different point in time. For comparing wages over time only real wages matter: these numbers are compensated by inflation. As we are now all painfully aware, this year's 1€ doesn't buy us as much coffees as last year's 1€. For example in the summary of august 2025 linked above they indicate a median net increase of 11.5% compared to the previous year. This is a nominal comparison. Using real wages it is only a 7.6% increase.

  3. They compare wages in relative terms as percent increases or decreases. Relative terms are difficult to grasp and tend to mislead. For example a 50% increase of a little amount is a little amount in absolute terms. Comparing absolute values, whether you mentally convert them in number of bureks, coffees, gemišts or Thompson concert tickets, are more relatable.

  4. They compare all these numbers with the value they had in the previous month and exactly one year ago. This is arbitrary and no understanding of the global trends can be gathered by comparing the current wages to these specific points in time. It may well be that the last year the same comparison yielded a percent decrease, so even if you get an increase now, it doesn't mean that workers are now better paid than at every point in history.

  5. They talk both about net and gross wages. Both can be useful but only net wages tells us what gets into the worker's pocket.

Just forget about these DZS summaries and HINA press releases for now. In their current form, they will likely only mislead you.

In order to get better insights on the global evolution of wages over the years in Croatia using robust and relatable magnitudes we proceed as follows:

  1. We convert all past wages to their real value at the time of our last data point using the Croatian consumer price index. This means all values are compensated for inflation. So any 1€ you read on the charts below corresponds to 1€ in the world we live in 2025. Past values in kunas were converted by the DZS at the fixed exchange rate of 1€ for 7.5425 kunas before we adjusted them for inflation.

  2. We look at the distribution of wages using the robust statistics of percentiles.

    The 10% percentile is the maximal wage that 10% of the workers get. 10% of the workers earn less than that and 90% of the workers earn more than that.

    The 20% percentile is the maximal wage that 20% of the workers get. 20% of the workers earn less than that and 80% of the workers earn more than that.

    The other percentiles are defined accordingly. The 50% percentile, also known as the median, is the maximal wage that 50% of the workers get. Half of the workers earn less than that and half of the workers earn more than that. It is the minimal amount that half of the workers get.

  3. We look at the distribution of wages over time. This allows to see the trends and since we use real values everything is now comparable and understandable in absolute terms. There is no need for misleading relative thinking in terms of percent increases or decreases.

  4. We only consider the net monthly wages as this is what gets in the worker's pocket.

Using the data published by the DZS, this gives us the following picture. The median is in white. Tap or hover the graphic to sample the data points.

Updated 2025-11-24 – devijacije.org – source: Državni zavod za statistiku

Here are a couple of points to notice:

  1. At the end of the time series in 2025 each percentile has a higher value than the one it had in 2016. Since all wages are compensated by inflation in the graph, this suggests a concrete overall increase of wages in Croatia. Note that this is a statistical insight, it doesn't mean that your own wage has increased: it may have shifted from one percentile to another one.
  2. It seems that during 2022 there was a general wage decrease. Everyone was getting less money. But the year 2023, the year of the introduction of the €, brought that trend to an end.
  3. The median (50%) maximal value is currently in the month of 09. 2025. This is the point in time since 2016 at which the minimal wage half of the Croatian workers were getting was at its maximum.
  4. One question is what happens with the 10% of wages of the most highly paid workers that are above the 90% percentile. We cannot tell anything about this because the DZS does not publish any percentile value above the 90% percentile, let alone the 100% percentile. In june 2025 this unknown top tier represents around 149.000 wages.

One last thing to notice is that the vertical distances of the percentiles to the median (in white) is mostly constant over time for the lower percentiles (10-40%). This means that the wage structure remains stable over time for these percentiles. However that distance becomes larger over time in the higher percentiles (60-90%). This suggests that higher wages benefit from pay increases that lower wages do not.

This trend is difficult to measure with the eye. But it is easy to compute by sampling the graph between 01. 2016. and 07. 2025: the median value increased by 353,24€ and the 90% percentile by 563,25€. So during this time period, the minimal wage of the top 10% workers increased by 563,53€-353,24€ = 210,01€ more than the minimal wage of half of the workers.

But as we said point to point comparisons are poor indicators and fail to capture the trends. To clarify how the distribution is evolving we subtract, at each point in time, the value of the median from the percentiles. For percentiles below the median this gives us the minimal amount in € that their wage is smaller than the median. For percentiles above the median that gives us the minimal amount in € their wage is greater than the median. The resulting picture is as follows.

Updated 2025-11-24 – devijacije.org – source: Državni zavod za statistiku

Here are two takeways:

  1. The graphic makes it clear that when subtracted with the median the lower percentiles mostly follow a horizontal line over time. But we can see a small downward trend starting at the beginning of 2024. Lower wages are getting further away from the median. This means that these wages no longer increase in the same proportion as the median wage. For example the 20% percentile compared to the median wage lost 33.57€ between 01. 2016. and 07. 2025.
  2. The trend for wages that are above the median is also better highlighted in this graphic. They are clearly going up over time compared to the median. This means that these wages benefit from greater increases than the median wage. The 90% percentile compared to the median wage gained 210€ between 01. 2016. and 07. 2025.

To sum up the result of this little exercice and go back to our initial questions, the first graph shows us that real wages have increased overall in Croatia since 2016 and the second graph indicates that wage inequality is on the rise. The latter can be characterized in concrete amounts among the different percentiles for 90% of the workers by sampling the graph.

We remain of course very curious about how the top 10% wages behave over time, but as we already said, that information is not published. Fear of class war?

Questions

Why do the graphs stop in 2016?

The monthly distribution of wages is only published from 2016 by the DZS.

Why don't we get the 100% percentile?

It is redacted in the published data for confidentiality reasons. Wouldn't it be obscene to get to know how much the top paid employee of Croatia earns ?

Will you keep updating the chart?

We may update the data from time to time as long as we feel that these charts give a better idea about the structure of Croatian wages than what is currently communicated to the public by DZS and the mass media. Feel free to get in touch to request an update.

Can I publish these graphics in my own publication?

We are very happy for you to do so. Please credit the graphic as © devijacije.org and the data source as © Državni zavod za statistiku. Here are SVG files:

If you tell us, we are happy to link back to your publication here.

Which data did you use to make the plots?

The raw data is from the DZS website. The consumer price index values are found in the DZS PC-Axis databases. The time series of nominal wage distribution are in the table 9.3.19. of the DZS statistics in line.

Is there a croatian translation of this page?

Yes.

Another question? Spotted an error?

Send us a message to info@devijacije.org.