Real wages in Mexico rose 15.1% over five years, nearly triple the OECD average, while only the US and Canada saw their real minimum wage fall.

This article by Dora Villanueva originally appeared in the July 7, 2026 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.

Minimum wage increases and also collective bargaining over pay have led Mexico to be one of the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) with the greatest recovery of real wages in the last five years, according to a report by the organization.

In five years, from the first quarter of 2021 to the same period of 2026, real wages in the country advanced 15.1 percent, above the average of OECD countries, where the advance was 4.9 percent. That is, the purchasing power of pay has grown almost three times more than the average of the countries that make up the organization.

According to the OECD Employment Outlook report, also when comparing only last year’s figures, the real growth of wages in Mexico, that is, counting how much their purchasing power changed, was the second highest among the countries that make up the organization, only behind Slovenia.

The boost to pay in Mexico responds in large part to the recovery of the minimum wage, according to what the OECD statistics reported, where the indicator registered a real increase of almost 30 percentage points in the last five years.

The real minimum wage was 11 percent higher in April 2026 than in the same month of 2021, in an average of 30 countries analyzed, “and its median increase, without considering outliers (for example, Mexico), was 9 percent,” the report adds.

It also notes that the real minimum wage was lower in April 2026 than in January 2021 in only two countries: Canada and the United States.

At the same time, it points out that another advance recorded in Mexico, especially in recent years, has to do with productivity.

“Labor productivity growth has been relatively high since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis in two Latin American countries (Colombia and Mexico), two countries of Central and Eastern Europe (Poland and Slovakia), two Baltic states (Latvia and Lithuania), as well as in Korea and the United States,” the report notes.

It notes that in all of them, productivity growth was already “relatively high at least since the mid-1990s,” except in Mexico.

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