Minimum wage in Israel will increase for the second time in a year: NIS 5,880

Good news especially for minimum-wage workers. Tomorrow, on April 1, the minimum wage in Israel will increase for the second time in a year by a significant amount. Starting with the April salary, which will be paid at the beginning of May, the minimum wage in Israel will rise, according to a decree signed by the Minister of Labor, Yoav Ben-Zur, to NIS 5,880, compared to NIS 5,571.75 last year.

The minimum wage for an hourly employee will now be NIS 32.3 per hour, instead of NIS 30.61 until now. It should be noted that those who work in a casual hourly or daily job, and not for a monthly salary, will be able to receive the new rate from the employer immediately in the coming days.
This is the second nice increase since April last year, when the minimum wage previously was for a very long time, since 2019, only NIS 5,300 per month and was not updated for years. The minimum wage is now updated according to the automatic update mechanism stipulated in the Minimum Wage Law, which business parties tried to cancel two years ago - without success. At that time, the average wage increased greatly due to the Corona crisis, and therefore the employers tried to cancel the minimum wage formula, according to which it is updated every year according to the average wage - when it stands at 47.5% of the average wage in the economy. The work committee of the Knesset at that time, headed by MK Efrat Raiten, strongly opposed the change.
More than two years ago, an agreement was signed between the Ministry of Finance and the Histadrut, according to which the minimum wage will increase from 5,300 to 5,400 shekels only. The chairman of the Labor and Welfare Committee at the time, MK Raiten, saw this as a shameful agreement and refused to approve it, claiming that the minimum wage would increase by at least NIS 200 per month, but the government and the employers refused. Although the minimum wage workers therefore lost NIS 1,200 for a whole year, in the end they came out profitable from the postponement, when the government and employers were forced to comply with the law and on April 1, 2023 raise the minimum wage all at once in the amount of 271 NIS to 5,571.75 NIS, to 47.5 % of the average salary in the economy.
Now the minimum wage will rise again by a high amount of another NIS 308, which is an increase of about 5.5%, which is expected to lead to a relatively significant increase for those who earn relatively low amounts each month. This is because when the minimum wage goes up, the wages of those who earn slightly above the minimum wage also go up - because the gap that was between the low wages and the minimum wage is small and is null following the increase. At the bottom of the income ladder in Israel today stand hundreds of thousands of workers in the food industry (restaurants, cafes and bars) and hospitality (hotels, B&Bs, etc.).