2 September 2026
The figure we published as a finding had been produced by our own bug.
A zero that could not have come out otherwise
The tax model applied a single scale, the 2010 one, across the whole 1976-2026 series. A scale with a 12,000 € tax-free threshold, applied to a wage of a few thousand euros, cannot return anything but zero.
That zero did not stay in the code. It had made its way into the text, in five places, as a finding: tax was zero in 47 of the 51 years. The site was citing its own bug as a result.
The scales exist, they are just not collected anywhere
Tax scales were reindexed every year by ministerial decision. There is no single act holding all of them, it takes one gazette issue per year.
And there is a trap before 1992: the scale had no zero-rate band at all. Tax-free amounts were subtracted from the TAX, not from income. The usual question, whether the wage fell below the threshold, does not even apply in those years.
Thirteen years with tax
With the real scales, the minimum wage paid income tax in 13 of the 39 years we can compute. The first is 1990, back in the drachma.
The worst is not the present one. It is 2011, when the threshold dropped to 5,000 € while the wage had not yet been cut: the index falls from 414 to 397 classic wraps a month. In 2026 it falls from 215 to 208.
What stays open
For the first 12 years, 1976-1987, we still have no documented scale. We do not fill them with a guess, they stay marked as a gap.
A bug that flatters you is harder to spot than one that annoys you. This one flattered: it said the minimum wage was never taxed.
See the same numbers live in the interactive dashboard.
The figures in this article are not written by hand: they are computed from the data series and change when it does. Prices and wages up to August 2026. Dataset version 2026.09-grammes, last updated 2026-08-31.