Italy and Portugal Agree: Discussing Your Salary Is Vulgar, Which Works Out Nicely for Whoever Isn't Raising It

🇮🇹 Italy · 🇵🇹 Portugal

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Italy the average gross wage is €36,594 a year; in Portugal it is closer to €24,818 — and yet both countries have independently arrived at the same solution to wage stagnation, which is to not call it a raise but to mail you an extra paycheck twice a year and call it a holiday gift. According to OECD-referenced wage data compiled by Euronews and idealista, this arrangement has persisted for decades, survived multiple recessions, and continues to be marketed to newcomers as generous rather than, more accurately, deferred.

Do's & Don'ts

🇮🇹 Italy

🇵🇹 Portugal

Italy: The Thirteenth Month Fixes Everything, Except the Twelve Before It

According to ISTAT's most recent structural wage report, the average gross annual salary (RAL) in Italy sits at roughly €31,856–€37,302 depending on the measurement year, with dramatic internal variation: dirigenti (executives, 1.1% of the workforce) average €106,606, while operai (blue-collar workers, 55.2% of the workforce) average €27,266. Italy is also one of the few EU countries with no statutory minimum wage, leaving sectoral collective bargaining agreements (CCNL) to set the effective floor — a system that means your actual negotiating room depends less on your résumé and more on which contract category your job title happens to fall under.

Layered on top is the tredicesima, a mandatory 13th-month payment every employee receives in December, and — depending on sector — a quattordicesima, an optional 14th-month payment common in commerce, tourism, and logistics. Hofstede Insights scores Italy relatively high on masculinity (competitive, achievement-oriented) yet the culture around discussing individual pay remains notably closed; ambition is publicly performed, compensation is not publicly disclosed. The result is a labor market that rewards knowing the right collective contract far more than it rewards asking for more.

Portugal: Fourteen Payments, One Very Persistent Wage Gap

INE data puts the average gross monthly wage in Portugal at €1,694 in 2025, up 5.6% nominally and 3.2% in real terms from €1,604 the year before — genuine progress, and one reason idealista and Euronews have flagged Portugal among the OECD's real-wage growth stories this year. The base is nonetheless modest by Western European standards, and roughly a quarter of the workforce sits at or near the national minimum wage, which recent Trading Economics data places above €1,000 a month for the first time. Compensation is structured, like Italy's, around extra "months": the subsídio de férias (holiday bonus) and subsídio de Natal (Christmas bonus), each equal to one month's base pay and legally mandatory under the Código do Trabalho.

Hofstede's data shows Portugal scoring low on individualism and high on uncertainty avoidance relative to Italy — consistent with a labor culture that prizes job security and seniority-based progression over the individual salary negotiation more common in Anglophone markets. Meanwhile Lisbon's tech and multinational sector, buoyed by remote-friendly foreign hiring and newcomer tax incentives, has pulled ahead of the national picture fast enough that the country now runs two visibly different pay conversations under one flag.

The Reckoning

Put side by side, Italy's higher average wage and Portugal's lower one obscure a more interesting symmetry: both countries have, for decades, treated the extra "month" of salary as a substitute for the kind of structural wage growth other European economies pursue through the actual monthly number. It is a tidy trick — employees feel richer twice a year, employers avoid resetting the base salary anyone measures a raise against, and neither side has to have the ordinary, functional-adult conversation about what the job is actually worth on a rolling basis.

The counterintuitive twist is that Portugal, the lower-paid of the pair, is currently the one posting real wage gains, while Italy's average has been comparatively flat against inflation for years. Being the cheaper country to hire in, it turns out, is not the same as being the country content to stay that way.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Blind — an engineering manager candidate evaluating a Lisbon offer found the base plus bonus landed well below what an equivalent role would pay in Northern Europe or the US, despite the seniority of the title.

Blind — a software engineer comparing offers in Italy noted gross figures hovering around €70,000, with several commenters framing the shortfall against US or German pay as offset by lifestyle rather than compensation.

Blind — someone planning a move to Lisbon on a €50,000 salary was startled to calculate take-home pay closer to €3,000 a month once taxes and typical costs were factored in, well under the number that had looked appealing on paper.

Quora — a respondent explained that Italy has no statutory minimum wage, and that a meaningful share of employment runs through informal or under-declared arrangements that keep official pay figures artificially low, with a "good" net salary sitting around €1,300–€1,400 a month for many workers.

Quora — a respondent described average non-specialized pay in Portugal as falling between €800 and €1,000 a month before tax, a figure difficult to reconcile with Lisbon and Porto rents that have climbed well past what those wages were designed to cover.

Conclusion

Neither country's compensation system is broken so much as it is honest about its own priorities: stability and sectoral fairness over individual negotiation, seniority over hustle, and a calendar built around two extra "Christmases" rather than a base salary that moves much on its own. For anyone relocating, the practical advice is unglamorous but essential — get the annual gross, divide by the real number of payments (13 or 14, never assume 12), ask what's actually mandatory versus contractual, and price in the tax and rent gap before the offer letter feels generous. Both economies have built compensation cultures that reward patience over confrontation, which is either deeply civilized or a very long con, depending on which December paycheck you're currently waiting for.