The wages set in the agreement advanced by an average of 3.06% in October, a tenth more than the 3.05% recorded in September, but they remain almost 1.9 percentage points below October’s CPI, whose preliminary year-on-year rate stood at 4.9% while the National Institute of Statistics (INE) confirms the definitive figure next Friday.
According to the collective bargaining statistics that the Ministry of Labour and Social Economy publishes each month, with the October figure the average wage increase in the agreement now adds up to six straight months of moving around 3%.
This year, unions and employers have pending the signing of a new Agreement for Employment and Collective Bargaining (AENC), after the current agreement expired last December, which recommended wage increases of 3% for 2025, with a revision clause that, in the event of a deviation in inflation, could add up to an additional 1% in each of the years of the period 2023-2025.
For the new deal, which has not yet begun to be negotiated—one of the arguments of the general strike called for tomorrow by the trade union organizations—UGT and CCOO have conveyed to the employers a proposal for a fixed increase of 4% per year over the next three years, which would mean a cumulative rise in wages of 12% by 2028.
They have also proposed an additional increase of 1% in the agreements where the average wage is 10% below the national average wage, an extra 2% for those that are 20% below and an improvement of 3% for those that are 30% below. In parallel, they propose an additional increase of 1.5% each year if there is a deviation in inflation.
The agreements signed this year include an average increase of 3.60%
Most of the agreements included up to October in the Labor statistics were signed in previous years, although their economic effects will play out in 2026.
Specifically, up to the tenth month of the year, 3,162 collective agreements with economic effects in 2026 have been counted, of which only 810 were signed between January and October of this year, with an average wage increase of 3.60%, a figure 1.3 percentage points below the advance data for October inflation.
The other 2,352 agreements come from previous years and contemplate an average wage increase of 2.91%.
Taken together, the 3,162 collective agreements registered in the first ten months of the year covered more than 9.5 million workers.
Six out of ten workers still have no pay review clause
According to data from the Ministry of Labour, most of the collective agreements registered up to October do not include pay review clauses that protect against the loss of purchasing power. Specifically, of the 3,162 collective agreements counted, only 30% (948 collective agreements) included a wage guarantee clause and, of those, 673 provided that it would apply with retrospective effect.
The collective agreements that do include a review clause cover almost 3.77 million workers out of the more than 9.5 million covered by the collective agreements registered up to October, which is equivalent to 39.34% of the total.
Thus, almost six out of ten workers lack this type of safeguard in their collective agreements. Even so, the number of employees protected through this tool remains more than 18 points higher than that recorded in December 2023 (21.08%).
Of the total number of collective agreements recorded up to October, 2,322 were company-level agreements, with an impact on 581,678 workers and an average wage increase of 2.61%; 780 were sectoral agreements, which covered more than 8.8 million workers, with an average increase of 3.10%, and 60 corresponded to groups of companies, with effects on 148,599 workers and an average wage increase of 2.27%.
The average weekly working time stands at 38.14 hours
The average working time agreed in the collective agreement reached, up to October, 1,741.25 annual hours per worker (1,696.4 hours in company-level agreements, 1,749 hours in group-of-companies agreements, and 1,744.1 in sectoral agreements).
Translated into weekly terms, these 1,741.25 annual hours are equivalent to 38.14 hours, above the 37.5 weekly hours of the legally maximum working time (1,712 annual hours) included in the Government’s bill to reduce working time, an initiative that faded after the amendments to the whole by Vox, PP and Junts succeeded last year.
With the October data, the average working day in company agreements stands at around 37.16 weekly hours, slightly below the target of the Ministry of Labour and the unions of reducing the working day to 37.5 hours. In agreements for groups of companies, the gap is greater, with an average weekly working day of 38.3 hours, while in sectoral agreements the average rises to 38.2 hours.
Workers affected by 'descuelgues' increase by 9.5%
The Labour statistics also show that, up to October, 307 non-application cases of agreements were recorded, above the 291 counted in the same period of 2025 (+5.5%).
These 'descuelgues' affected a total of 14,812 workers, compared with the 13,522 recorded up to October 2025, which implies an increase of 9.5%. The 'descuelgue' of agreements entails the review of working conditions in companies.