Poland in 2022 took the 19th place in the European Union (EU) in terms of wages adjusted for purchasing power (PPS), according to data published by Eurostat. Residents of Luxembourg earned the best and Bulgarians the worst.

The Purchasing Power Standard (PPS) is an indicator used by the European statistics office Eurostat. It is an artificial currency unit that is intended to eliminate price differences in order that for one PPS unit the same amount of goods and services can be bought in different countries.

Median equivalised disposable income expressed in PPS considers income distribution and household size and composition. The PPS unit considers differences in price levels, ensuring comparability between countries.

In Western and Northern European countries, incomes are much better than in Poland, but prices in shops are sometimes higher. To indicate how much of a country’s goods and services can be purchased, economists convert the data into PPS-type units – the higher the salary in PPS, the higher the purchasing power, so more goods and services can be purchased.

In the 2022 data, Eurostat reported the median (middle value) per capita income in the EU – across the Community it was 18,706 PPS. This is higher than in 2021 (18,011 PPS).

The EU countries with the highest median disposable income in 2022 were Luxembourg (33 214 PPS), the Netherlands (25 437 PPS), Austria (25 119 PPS), Belgium (24 142 PPS), Denmark (23 244 PPS). PPS) and Germany (23 197 PPS).

By contrast, the lowest values were recorded in Bulgaria (9671 PPS), Slovakia (9826 PPS), Romania (10 033 PPS), Hungary (10 217 PPS) and Greece (10 841 PPS). Poland was ranked 19th in the list with a score of 14 906 PPS. In 2021, the median income in Poland will be 13,866 PPS. The purchasing power of wages in Poland is 2.2 times lower than in Luxembourg.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński