Minimum wage

Georgia has a statutory minimum wage, and it is one of the strangest figures in the whole pay system. For the private sector it is still 20,00 ₾ a month, a number set by a presidential decree back in 1999 and never revised since. It is a real, formally registered legal value — not a fabricated zero — but it is symbolic. It bears almost no relationship to what anyone is actually paid, and it should never be read as a living-wage floor.

A 1999 figure, frozen in place

The 20,00 ₾ monthly minimum comes from Presidential Decree No. 351 of 1999, which set a minimum wage for all enterprises and organisations operating in Georgia regardless of ownership or legal form. That decree is still on the books. What has not happened, in the quarter-century since, is any indexation to prices or wages — so a figure that meant something in 1999 has been left untouched while the economy around it moved on. A separate minimum for public-sector and executive-branch employees was set higher in 2005, but the general private-sector figure is the 1999 one.

Symbolic, not binding

In practice the private-sector minimum is non-binding and unenforced. No employer is constrained by it, because real market wages sit far above it and no serious enforcement mechanism attaches to it. There has been no binding national private-sector minimum-wage reform in the 2024–2026 period to replace it. So while the number is genuine, its practical force is close to nil: it tells you about the history of Georgian labour law, not about what a job will pay. Treat it as a legal curiosity rather than a benchmark.

What people actually earn

For a real sense of scale, look at the statistics office rather than the decree. Geostat reports an average monthly gross salary of about 2 363,80 ₾ — many times the symbolic minimum — with a median (the midpoint, where half earn more and half less) of roughly 1 332,00 ₾. The average sits well above the median, as it usually does, because higher salaries pull the mean upward; the median is the better guide to a “typical” wage. Either way, both are worlds apart from the 20,00 ₾ on the statute, which is why we keep the decree and the real figures firmly separated on this site.

How this calculator treats it

Because the minimum wage is symbolic, the net-pay calculator does not use it as a floor or a default. You enter your own gross, and the tool applies the flat income tax and the pension contribution to that figure. We surface the 20,00 ₾ decree here for completeness and honesty — it is part of the legal picture — but we frame it exactly as it is: a real statutory value with no living-wage meaning. If you want to judge an offer, compare it against the average and median above, not against the 1999 minimum.

The full content of this page is still in preparation and subject to review.