The raise you needed just to stand still
A raise feels like a raise. The number on the payslip went up, and going up is good. But the only question that matters is whether it went up faster than prices did — and for the last few years, in most countries, the bar was set unusually high.
Published August 7, 2026 · updates automatically with our data
The bar, country by country
Between 2020 and 2025 the median country in our set of 21 saw consumer prices rise about 22% in total — roughly 4.1% a year. That is the break-even line: a salary that grew less than that over the same 5 years buys less than it used to, no matter how the increase felt when it was announced.
The spread around that median is wide. In Switzerland, prices rose only 7% across the whole period (1.3% a year), so a modest raise genuinely was a raise. In Spain the bar was 22% (4.1% a year). And in Türkiye prices rose 578% — 46.6% a year — which means a salary needed to be multiplied by about 6.8× over 5 years simply to hold its ground.
Why the arithmetic feels wrong
Two things make this hard to see from inside a payslip. The first is that raises arrive as one-off events and inflation arrives continuously: you get 5% in March and then twelve months of prices grinding upward, so the peak of your purchasing power is the day the raise lands and it declines from there. The second is that percentages compound. Five years of 4% is not 20%, it is about 22% — and five years of 15% is not 75%, it is roughly double.
There is also a mismatch worth naming: a consumer price index is a national basket, and your basket is not the nation's. If your spending is dominated by rent, energy or imported goods, your personal inflation rate over these years was almost certainly higher than the headline. The index is the best available yardstick, not a description of your month.
What this is not
This is not a lecture about negotiating harder. Most people do not set their own pay: wages in much of the world are fixed by contracts, scales, minimum-wage law or the simple fact that no better offer exists. Falling behind inflation is usually something that happens to people, not something they chose by asking too politely — and a table like this is a measurement of that, not a scorecard of anyone's assertiveness.
What the numbers are good for is naming the thing accurately. “My pay went up 6% and I still feel poorer” is not confusion or ingratitude; in a year when prices rose more than 6%, it is arithmetic. Being able to say that clearly — with the actual figure for your own country — is more useful than any budgeting tip.
Check your own years
The window above is the last 5 years, but the interesting window is usually your own: the year you started a job, or last changed one. The inflation time machine takes any amount, any year and your country, and shows what that money is worth now — which is the same calculation as “what would my old salary need to be today”. Data: World Bank consumer price index, updated 2026-07-27; method on the methodology page.
Check what your salary needed to become →
MoneyCurio is an educational project. Nothing here is financial or investment advice; figures are approximations built from public data — see the methodology page for sources.