Two Consultancies Put Portuguese Pay Rises at 3.3 and 3.4 Percent for 2027, Which Is Roughly Where Inflation Sat in August
Korn Ferry and Marsh Portugal arrive at almost the same 2027 number from different samples, and the median does not clear 3 percent. Last year's growth was the minimum wage doing the work: operational roles up 6.5 percent, everyone else up 1.3.
Two separate surveys of what Portuguese employers intend to pay their staff next year landed within twenty-four hours of each other this week, and they agree almost exactly. The human resources consultancy Korn Ferry, in a note sent to newsrooms on Wednesday, puts the average planned pay rise for 2027 at 3.4 percent, drawn from responses by more than a hundred companies; 99 percent of them intend to grant increases at all. Marsh Portugal, whose study was reported a day earlier, arrives at 3.3 percent, with a median that does not go above 3 percent.
Set that against the number it has to beat. Portuguese consumer prices rose 3.3 percent in the year to August. As budgeted, 2027 is a standstill in real terms, and for the worker sitting at the median it is slightly worse than that.
Who gets the money
The spread by sector is where the surveys are most useful. Korn Ferry has information technology out in front again at 4.5 percent, oil and gas at 4.3 percent, and construction, building materials and transport at 3.6 percent. Cut the same data by job type and the largest planned rise, also 3.6 percent, goes to base functions, the administrative and operational roles at the bottom of the grid, which the consultancy attributes to the pull of the minimum wage.
Marsh's look backwards makes the point with more force. Its figure for the average movement between 2025 and 2026 is 4.1 percent, almost entirely the work of one group: pay for the most operational roles climbed 6.5 percent, while everyone else averaged 1.3 percent. Most of Portugal's wage growth over the past year, in other words, was the statutory floor rising and dragging the rung above it.
The floor, and where it is going
The salário mínimo nacional (national minimum wage) rose 5.7 percent this year to 920 euros gross a month, and is scheduled to reach 970 euros in 2027 under the tripartite accord signed by the government and the social partners. The same accord targets an average gross wage of 1,890 euros a month by 2028; the Instituto Nacional de Estatística (National Statistics Institute) had the average at 1,835 euros in June, a figure flattered by the top of the distribution. The Bank of Portugal's most recent reading of the median puts it at 984 euros net in 2025: half of everyone working in Portugal took home less than a thousand euros a month.
That gap explains the argument now running through the Concertação Social (Social Concertation), the tripartite forum that met on Wednesday with the Finance Minister, Joaquim Miranda Sarmento, to be briefed on the 2027 budget. The CGTP is demanding 1,100 euros from 1 January; the UGT says there is room to go above the agreed 970. The employer confederations want the accord left alone, the CIP arguing that the productivity gains it assumed have not materialised, the CCP putting it more sharply still: "the worst enemy of the average wage is the minimum wage decree."
How much to trust a pay survey
Less than fully, and Korn Ferry supplies the caveat itself. Asked how the previous year's intentions turned out, 68 percent of companies said they applied the increases they had originally planned, 16 percent came in below plan, and the rest went above. Roughly one employer in six talked itself down over the cycle.
For a foreign professional weighing an offer in Portugal, the practical reading is that 3 to 3.5 percent is the number in the budget, that technology is the one sector reliably paying above it, and that the recent run of headline wage growth has been concentrated well below the professional grades.
