Monthly minimum wage
The statutory national minimum wage, expressed on a monthly basis in US dollars: the legal floor for pay, not what a typical worker earns.
How it is measured
National legislation as recorded by the ILO. Rates set per hour or per day are converted by the ILO to a monthly basis.
Where the number came from
The statutory minimum wage is a New Zealand invention: the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1894 created the first national machinery for setting one, and the Australian state of Victoria followed in 1896. Britain’s Trade Boards Act of 1909 brought the idea to Europe, and the United States established a federal floor in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The ILO’s Minimum Wage Fixing Convention of 1970 set the modern international framework, and it deliberately leaves the level to national decision while specifying the process: consultation with employers and workers, and periodic review. That word "periodic" is doing a lot of work, because the convention cannot compel a government to actually revise a rate, and the countries at the bottom of our table are almost all cases where nobody has.
Worked example: a floor that moves automatically, one that has not moved since 2009, and two that never moved at all
Four figures from our table tell the whole story of this field. France sits at roughly $2,036 a month for 2025, because the SMIC is indexed: it rises automatically with inflation and with average worker pay, so it cannot silently erode. The United States comes in at about $1,257, which is not a policy judgement but simple arithmetic on a federal rate of $7.25 an hour that has not changed since 2009, worked out over a full-time month. Most American workers are covered by a higher state or city floor, so the federal figure understates the effective minimum across the country while accurately reporting the national statute. Then Georgia at roughly $7.35 a month and Rwanda at about $1.97. Neither is a data error, and neither describes any real wage. Georgia’s statutory minimum was set in 1999 and Rwanda’s in 1974, and inflation plus currency movement has since reduced both to sums that would not buy lunch. They remain on the books, so the ILO records them, and we publish them rather than quietly dropping the inconvenient rows. The lesson generalises: a minimum wage figure is only meaningful next to the date the law was last revised and next to average earnings in the same country. Set our two wage tables side by side and the ratios say it plainly. France’s floor is about 40 percent of French average earnings and the American federal floor about 20 percent of American average earnings, both of which bind on real labour markets. Rwanda’s is under 4 percent of Rwandan average earnings and Georgia’s a little over 2 percent of Georgian earnings, which is another way of saying the law has stopped participating in the economy it governs.
Figures read from our own monthly minimum wage table; each row there carries its observation year and whether it came from a live feed or the frozen archive.
Our data source
ILOSTAT (EAR_INEE_CUR_NB_A), CC BY 4.0.
Refresh cadence: Annual, and unusually current: most countries carry a 2024 or 2025 figure.
What to watch for
A legal floor says little about actual pay. Several statutory minima have gone unrevised for decades and are now nominal: Rwanda’s dates from 1974 and Georgia’s from 1999, which is why they convert to a couple of dollars a month rather than indicating an error. Some countries set minima by sector or region instead of nationally, so a single national figure can misrepresent them, and a few have no statutory minimum at all and are absent. Compare against average earnings before drawing conclusions.