Hotel, café and restaurant workers in Monaco move onto higher minimum hourly rates from Sunday 1st November, with the lowest grade rising to €12.44. The revision comes as the Principality’s unions continue to march for a minimum wage of €2,680 a month.
The new salary scale, published in the Journal de Monaco on Friday 30th October, covers employees, supervisors and management under the hospitality industry’s collective agreement. For employees, minimum hourly pay ranges from €12.44 at the first grade to €14.43 at the highest of nine classifications. Supervisory staff have three minimum rates, running from €14.85 to €15.88, while management grades start at €19 and reach €28.99.
What changes for workers
The revision raises the pay floor attached to each classification, so its effect on an individual’s salary depends on their grade and existing pay. Workers paid below the new minimum for their classification must have their pay brought into line, but the scale does not in itself mean a rise for employees already earning above those thresholds.
For a full-time employee working a 39-hour week, the new entry rate is equivalent to around €2,102 gross a month. Monaco’s general minimum wage, which has stood at €12.02 an hour since 1st January, produces €2,031.38.
When the scale was revised in December 2024, the entry rate was set at €12.13 and the top management grade at €28.42. The lowest grade therefore rises by 31 cents an hour, or about 2.6 per cent, while the highest management rate increases by 57 cents.
A year of union pressure
The new rates follow months of mobilisation over pay and pensions, in which hospitality workers have been among the most visible participants.
On 10th April, the Union des Syndicats de Monaco (USM) called a 24-hour strike at the Hôtel de Paris, the Hermitage and the Monte-Carlo Bay, with shorter stoppages at the Méridien and the Fairmont, during the quarter-finals of the Rolex Monte-Carlo Masters. Unions said close to 1,000 people joined the march that day, which called for a Monegasque minimum wage, known as the SMIM, of €2,620 gross a month.
By 23rd September, when more than a thousand people marched through the Principality to the Caisses Sociales, the demand had risen to €2,680. Protesters also called for higher employer contributions to the pension system and opposed reforms currently being studied by a working group of government representatives, social partners and the Caisses Sociales. The USM has since called a further rally outside the Caisses Sociales for 20th October.
Hospitality unions have linked pay to the demands of the work itself. Speaking at an earlier march in December 2025, Giuseppe Dogliatti of the café-restaurant union told Monaco Hebdo: “Our profession is arduous to begin with, with many constraints, and we do not want a new pension reform that would force us to work longer.”
The unions’ €2,680 target equates to roughly €15.86 an hour. That is above every employee grade in the new hospitality scale and broadly level with the top supervisory rate.
The new minimums apply from 1st November across all the classifications it covers.
Monaco Life is written by qualified journalists, writing original content. Sign up for our free newsletter, listen to our podcasts on Spotify, and follow us across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Tik Tok.