Spanish salaries have never been higher, but the region you choose makes a huge difference

New figures from Spain’s national statistics institute show average wages at a record high. The catch? Where you live can shift your pay packet by thousands.

Spain is pulling in more foreign residents than ever, and for most of them, the question of money comes up pretty quickly. What will I earn and will it be enough? It turns out the honest answer depends a lot on which part of the country you decide to move to.

According to the INE, Spain’s national statistics institute, the average gross salary has climbed to €2,531 per month. That’s the highest figure ever recorded, and works out to roughly €35,434 a year. The annual total is calculated over fourteen months rather than twelve, because Spanish employers traditionally pay a double salary in both July and December. It’s one of those things nobody warns you about before you sign a contract.

The record high is good news, but the average still masks some real inequality. Young workers and people on temporary contracts, and there are a lot of them in Spain, tend to earn well below the mean. The gender pay gap hasn’t gone away either.

Sector matters too. Energy is by far the best-paid field, with an average gross monthly salary of €6,511. Hospitality sits at the bottom at €2,015 a month, a gap that says a lot about the structure of Spain’s economy.

The region you choose changes everything

If there’s one thing the INE data makes clear, it’s that Spain is seventeen labour markets. The Basque Country pays the best, with an average annual salary of €33,504. Madrid comes in second at €32,219, followed by Navarre at €31,199.

At the other end, Extremadura, the quiet, largely agricultural region on the Portuguese border, averages just €23,684. That’s a gap of nearly €10,000 a year between top and bottom, which is significant by any measure.

How does Spain stack up against the UK, Australia and Canada?

For English speakers moving from abroad, Spain’s salaries will likely feel like a step down though not always as dramatic a one as people expect.

In the UK, the median full-time salary was £39,039 in 2025, according to the Office for National Statistics, roughly €46,000 at current exchange rates. That’s about 30% above Spain’s average, though anyone moving from London, where pay is considerably higher, will feel the gap more sharply.

Australia is the biggest contrast. Average gross salaries there have hit around AUD 100,000 — closer to €60,000 — making Spain look decidedly modest by comparison. Canada sits somewhere between the UK and Australia, with an average of around CAD $68,200 a year, or roughly €45,000.

Spain minimum wage rise: what €1,221 means for workers and employers

Not the full story visible in salary figures

But salary figures on their own don’t tell the full story. The cost of living in much of Spain (rent, food, eating out) is genuinely lower than in London, Sydney or Toronto. Plenty of people who make the move find the pay cut hurts less than they anticipated once they’re actually living here. That said, anyone heading to Madrid or Barcelona should be realistic: housing costs in both cities have risen sharply in recent years, and the old assumption that Spain is always cheap no longer holds everywhere.

The minimum wage has gone up, but it’s still well below UK levels

Spain’s minimum wage currently stands at €1,184 per month, up 4.4% on last year. The government pushed the increase through deliberately, with the aim of improving conditions for the roughly 2.5 million workers who depend on it, people working in agriculture, tourism, and domestic roles, mainly.

To put that in context: the UK minimum wage rose to £12.21 an hour in April 2025, putting a full-time worker on around £2,300 a month. The floor in Spain is substantially lower, though many Spanish industries operate under collective bargaining agreements that guarantee more than the statutory minimum, so the headline figure isn’t always what workers actually take home.