Tens of thousands of rail workers in the UK went on strike last week calling for increased pay and better working conditions. This has created chaos for people planning to travel before Christmas. Train strikes will continue into January 2023.
In Europe, the UK is not the only country in which rail workers went on strike in 2022. Industrial actions have taken place recently in EU countries such as France, Austria, the Netherlands and Italy, and they are expected to continue.
In the EU, the annual inflation rate was 11.5 per cent in October 2022, reaching levels not seen before since the early 1980s. Industrial actions have triggered discussions about the wages of rail workers, including train drivers. So which countries pay train drivers the most and the least in Europe? And how have rail workers’ salaries changed in the UK?
Eurostat, the statistical office of the EU, offers insight. Based on estimates collected through the EU Structure of Earnings Survey (SES), it provides an overview of railway sector wages using data from 2021.
As the Eurostat dataset does not include the UK, Euronews Travel has taken data from the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) for comparison. Therefore, there might be methodological differences between the data for EU Member States and the UK. The calculations of salaries are explained below in more detail.
In 2021, the estimated average gross monthly earnings of train drivers ranged from €632 in Bulgaria to €5,542 in the UK. Among EU Member States, Denmark (€4,463) was the only country where train drivers earned more than €4,000. They were paid more than €3,000 in Ireland, Luxembourg, Germany and France. These countries were closely followed by the Netherlands (€2,947) and Finland (€2,939).
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