The gap
The minimum wage outran official inflation in every period. On paper you can buy more today than before. Pick a starting year and see what the gyro wrap says.
Starting year
Net minimum wage
1.39x
as each year's Gazette sets it
Headline consumer prices
1.32x
official CPI, ELSTAT
Price of the classic gyro wrap
2.77x
same product, rescaled to today's
The contradiction
From 2008 to 2026, the official figures say the wage beat inflation by +5%. On paper you should be buying more today. Over the same span the price of the wrap multiplied by 2.77, and the same wage buys 215 wraps a month instead of 430, that is -50%.
Documentation of the 2008:CInterpolated between documented anchors
All three set to 100 in 2008
The wider the orange line runs from the other two, the further the wrap outran them.
Every starting year
| From | Wage | CPI | Wrap | The wage buys | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1976 | 67.43x | 44.89x | 86.00x | -22% | B |
| 1985 | 9.63x | 9.33x | 21.50x | -55% | D |
| 2000 | 2.09x | 1.73x | 3.86x | -46% | A |
| 2008 | 1.39x | 1.32x | 2.77x | -50% | C |
| 2015 | 1.61x | 1.24x | 2.35x | -32% | B |
What this shows and what it does not
- One good is not the basket. This page does not claim the CPI is wrong. It shows that one everyday good, documented year by year, outran both the index and the wage.
- Part of the gap is already official. The catering sub-index runs above the headline one, and in our series that difference is 3.7 percentage points a year. It is not hidden, it is measured.
- For 1999-2018 the wrap price is not measured every year: it comes from the headline CPI plus that constant spread, anchored on the documented ends. At the ends of each comparison, where a document exists, it is a measurement.
- The comparison uses the classic wrap, rescaled to today's product. Era prices would give a larger multiplier, because they would charge the growth of the portion to inflation.
- The wage is net of contributions, not of income tax, and put on a twelve-month basis.
Check it yourself: the full year-by-year series and what we do not know.
Prices and wages up to August 2026. Dataset version 2026.09-psalida, last updated 2026-08-31. Reference year 2026, grade B.