Does increasing the minimum wage risk causing “a low-wage trap”?

To try to calm social anger, Sébastien Lecornu announced this Monday an increase in the minimum wage of 1.6%. Woohoo, good news for salaries? Not so sure... Because this increase could hide a trap, called in economics the low-wage trap.

The idea? When the minimum wage increases too much, salaries above it would end up stagnating. We carried out the investigation.

Sandrine Dorbes, compensation expert, speaker and author of Remuneration is not just a question of money (Dunod, 2025), takes the example of one of these clients, a mass distribution company. The basic salary was set at minimum wage + 50 euros. Increases took place in May, for a total company budget of 2%.

But in June, the minimum wage is automatically reevaluated by the government. “Concretely, beginner employees found themselves at the same salary level as those who had been promoted after one or two years of work. And the company had already spent all of its increase budget.

» A good or bad signal for the economy? France has 12% of employees on the minimum wage, a high figure compared to its European neighbors. Germany, for example, has half as many.

Furthermore, in France, the minimum wage, indexed to inflation, is the only salary in the country to have this privilege. Thus in 2023, marked by inflation at all heights, France experienced a peak of 17.3% of employees who were paid at the minimum wage level. Clément Carbonnier, co-director of the “Socio-fiscal policies” research axis of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for the Evaluation of Public Policies at Sciences Po, however defends: “A priori, increasing a salary cannot lower salaries,” he jokes.

“Improving the minimum wage remains a good signal sent to the economy... And it can even serve as a margin of negotiation for employees, by also wishing to have increases. » A slight catch-up quickly filled Thus, after the peak of 2023, France returned to its classic rate of 12% of workers on the minimum wage by 2024. Proof that wages end up increasing again even if the minimum increases.

What Clément Charbonnier summarizes: “The real problem is not that the minimum wage is increasing too quickly, but that other salaries are stagnating too much. » Christine Erhel, director of the Center for the Study of Employment and Labor and professor at Cnam, also reassures: “When we increase the minimum wage, there will be a slight catch-up on the other lower scales, but it is only time to readjust the company's salary scales. » In short, everyone benefits from it in the following year.

Machine-translated from French