I have a €1,300 pension and a paid-off house. If it is tight for me, imagine someone paying rent.

The favourable case

Let's start with what is not in dispute: I receive €1,300 a month in pension. I paid off the mortgage years ago, so the house is mine. I do not pay rent, I do not pay a loan, I do not have a landlord raising the bill every spring.

On paper, I am the favourable case.

And even so, I do the sums every month.

I am not saying it to complain about my luck, which is better than a lot of people's. I am saying it because that is exactly the starting point of the problem. If the most benign scenario already forces you to check the balance, then the question stops being an opinion and becomes arithmetic.

Five windows, the same room

Every reader will come into this text through a different door, so let us put the doors on the table.

There is the pensioner who, like me, paid off his house and lives on a pension that barely covers the month. There is the worker who has seen his salary rise and still does not make it. There is the young person with a stable job who cannot move out. There is the couple with two salaries who saves nothing. And there is the one who found work after a long time and discovered that having a job is not the same as having peace of mind.

Five situations, five ways of looking at the same bill. None of them has to be mine. One of them just has to be yours.

What did improve

Here it pays to be honest, because honesty is the only thing that makes a criticism hold up.

The Spanish minimum wage (SMI) stood at €735.90 a month in 2018, paid in fourteen instalments. In 2026 it is €1,221, also in fourteen instalments, which works out at €17,094 gross a year. That is eight increases and a cumulative rise of 66%, according to the Government itself. The minimum wage is exempt from income tax and the measure reaches around 2.5 million people.

That is not propaganda: it is a fact. And anyone who denies it is handing over the argument.

The other half of the figure

Now the other half, because a percentage without a reference point says nothing.

If we take that €735.90 from 2018 and update it with the inflation accumulated since then — 27.6% up to September 2026, according to the INE annual rates — the result is €939. That is what would be needed today just to avoid losing purchasing power.

€1,221 is being paid. According to this calculation, the minimum wage has around 30% more purchasing power than in 2018. Not bad. And it should be said in full: in 2022, with inflation at 5.7%, that same wage lost purchasing power. The gain was not a straight line, it came in jumps.

2018 — 735,90 €/mes · IPC 100,0 · SMI real 100,0

2019 — 900,00 €/mes · IPC 100,8 · SMI real 121,3

2020 — 950,00 €/mes · IPC 100,3 · SMI real 128,7

2021 — 965,00 €/mes · IPC 106,8 · SMI real 122,8

2022 — 1.000,00 €/mes · IPC 112,9 · SMI real 120,4

2023 — 1.080,00 €/mes · IPC 116,4 · SMI real 126,1

2024 — 1.134,00 €/mes · IPC 119,7 · SMI real 128,8

2025 — 1.184,00 €/mes · IPC 123,1 · SMI real 130,7

2026 — 1.221,00 €/mes · IPC 127,6 · SMI real 130,1

The figures say two things at once, and that is why they interest me. First: the minimum wage has risen far more than prices. Second: the real index fell in 2021 and 2022, and did not return to its 2020 level until 2024. Anyone who says the rise was a walk in the park has not looked at the series. Anyone who says it achieved nothing has not either.

Because the floor was raised from a hole

And here comes the uncomfortable question: if it has gained 30% in real terms, why is it still not enough?

The answer is not in the percentage. It is in the starting point.

A minimum wage that in 2018 did not cover a living does not become an adequate wage just because you raise it a lot. It becomes a less inadequate wage. The rise was enormous in relative terms and is still short in absolute terms, because it started from €736.

Housing: the figure that breaks the series

And then there is the part no wage statistic captures: housing.

According to idealista, the average rent in Spain closed July 2026 at €15.3 per square metre, the highest in its historical series. An 80-square-metre flat is about €1,224 a month. The minimum wage is €1,221.

Read that again, slowly: at that price per square metre, the rent for an 80-square-metre flat is practically equal to one monthly instalment of the minimum wage. The minimum wage is paid in fourteen instalments, while rent is paid twelve months a year; this is not a comparison of annual income and expenses.

In Madrid, at €23.7 per square metre, those same 80 square metres come to €1,896: 155% of the minimum wage. It is not that it does not stretch. It is that it does not exist.

And in my case, the favourable case: if tomorrow I had to rent that average flat, out of my €1,300 I would have €76 left. Seventy-six euros for food, electricity, water, transport, medicine and everything else. With the house paid off I just about manage. Without it, I do not.

El alquiler frente al SMI (2024–2026)

Diciembre de 2024 — 13,5 €/m² · Piso de 80 m²: 1.080 €/mes · SMI: 1.134 €/mes · Alquiler/SMI: 95 %

Diciembre de 2025 — 14,7 €/m² · Piso de 80 m²: 1.176 €/mes · SMI: 1.184 €/mes · Alquiler/SMI: 99 %

Julio de 2026 — 15,3 €/m² · Piso de 80 m²: 1.224 €/mes · SMI: 1.221 €/mes · Alquiler/SMI: 100 %

Two caveats are worth adding: the minimum wage is gross, not the net amount that reaches the account; and the rents quoted are asking prices, not rents from signed contracts. They are different reference points and should be interpreted with care. And there is a third, the most important one: in 2024 the average rent was already swallowing 95% of the minimum wage. The minimum wage rises of these two years have not opened up any room; they have merely preserved it.

The “too late” part

There is a second word that describes the problem better than any percentage: late.

The rises arrive after the damage. They come when the rent is already signed, when the electricity bill is already paid, when the family has already gone into debt or has already moved forty kilometres away from work. It is reactive policy: it acknowledges the problem once it has happened.

And a policy that is always late never catches up, because it is chasing a cost of living that runs away from it. Every year it approves last year’s budget.

The broken step

There is an effect almost nobody talks about and which explains a lot of bar-room conversations: the one just above.

When the floor rises, whoever was earning a little more is left with no improvement. Their salary does not move; their rent does. And suddenly they discover that they earn almost the same as someone on the minimum wage, but without having received the rise. The minimum wage protects some and does not automatically pull the rest along: not collective agreements, not middle incomes, not pensions.

So the rise, real as it is, leaves a broken step exactly where most people are. And that is where the feeling is born — hard to explain, easy to feel — that you work more, earn about the same and live worse.

The thousand euros that are missing

I come to the question in the title, and I will phrase it carefully, because it deserves rigour rather than a slogan.

It is often repeated that the average salary in Spain is around €2,500. I get €1,300 in pension. If the average is €2,500 and I am on €1,300, then €1,200 are missing. Where are they?

The easy answer would be to say that someone is taking them from me. The honest answer is more interesting: the average is not what most people earn. A handful of very high salaries drags the average up and leaves the impression that most people should be much better off than they are. The average is a mathematical operation, not a portrait of society. The figure that describes the ordinary person is the median, and it is almost never quoted.

But the underlying question still stands, and it is legitimate: if the country grows, if productivity rises, if the statistics improve, why does that improvement not show up in the pocket of the person producing it? There is no need to imagine anyone stealing. You just have to look at where the surplus ends up: in profits, in capital income and, very especially, in housing, which has become this country’s great vacuum cleaner for income. Every euro that rent goes up is a euro that leaves the salary without passing through any payroll.

That is the conversation that is not happening, and it is far more uncomfortable than the one about percentages.

And now, the question that matters

Acknowledging what has been done does not oblige you to hand over a blank cheque. And fearing what is coming should not replace demanding.

So let us stop arguing about whether the glass is half full or half empty and ask three concrete questions of whoever is in government, whoever it is:

What would you keep? What would you change? And how would you make housing, wages and pensions allow people to live, not just survive?

Because the problem is not that a government raises the minimum wage. The problem is that we have spent years celebrating rises while people are still doing the sums at the end of the month. And when the celebration and the bank balance do not match, the problem is not in the bank balance.

I am lucky enough to have my house paid off. That is my entire advantage, and it is not a small one. But a society that only works for those who were lucky enough to buy in time is not a society that works: it is a society running down its credit, generation after generation.

And from that, honestly, may heaven preserve us.

Note on figures and sources

• SMI: monthly amounts in 14 instalments from the official Ministry of Labour series (as compiled by Social Security and by Royal Decree 126/2026). Cumulative increase 2018–2026 of 66%, according to La Moncloa.

• CPI: annual December variation rates, INE series. The 2018–September 2026 cumulative figure (27.6%) is the author’s own calculation, chaining those rates and the 2026 cumulative figure.

• Rent: idealista monthly rent price reports (December 2024, December 2025 and July 2026). These are asking prices, not rents from signed contracts.

• The €2,500 average salary figure is quoted in the text as a commonly used claim, not as a verified data point. The article does not use it to calculate anything: it only serves to raise the difference between average and median.

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