Minimum wage to rise to €14.94 an hour from January 2027

Ireland’s national minimum hourly rate of pay will be €14.94 from 1 January 2027 under the National Minimum Wage Order 2026, made by the Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment, Peter Burke, T.D. The order, made in exercise of the powers conferred on the Minister by Section 10D of the National Minimum Wage Act 2000, is published as S.I. No. 533 of 2026 in Iris Oifigiúil No. 85 of 23 October 2026.

The instrument appears in Section I of the official gazette, the section reserved for statutory instruments, orders and regulations made by Ministers and other bodies. Its operative content is compressed into a single statement: the new hourly floor, the date from which it applies, and the two ancillary rates that accompany it where an employer provides board or lodgings. The notice carries no preamble beyond the legal basis, no schedule of exceptions and no statement of the rate it replaces.

The rates set by the order

The order fixes three figures, all taking effect on the same date:

• National minimum hourly rate of pay: €14.94, from 1 January 2027.
• Board: €1.34 per hour worked.
• Lodgings: €35.28 per week, or €5.04 per day.

The hourly rate is the headline figure and applies to the ordinary hourly rate of pay of workers covered by the National Minimum Wage Act 2000. The board and lodgings figures sit alongside it and are expressed in different units — one per hour worked, the other per week with a daily equivalent — reflecting the way accommodation and meals are provided in practice rather than a single flat deduction.

A fixed commencement date

The order does not leave the change to be brought in by ministerial commencement order at a later stage: the text states that the rate applies “from 1 January 2027”. That gives employers, payroll providers and representative bodies a defined date, roughly ten weeks after publication, to adjust contracts, payroll systems and published terms of employment.

Because the notice is confined to the new figures, it does not itself quantify the increase on the rate currently in force, nor does it set out the reasoning behind the level chosen. Those elements, if published at all, sit outside the gazette entry, which functions as the formal legal record of the decision rather than an explanatory document.

Legal basis and publication

The order was made under Section 10D of the National Minimum Wage Act 2000, the provision that allows the Minister to fix the national minimum hourly rate of pay by order. The Minister acts in his own name as head of the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment, and the instrument is published by Authority in Iris Oifigiúil, the State’s official gazette.

The same issue of the gazette carries a run of other statutory instruments, including S.I. No. 532 of 2026 on fixed charges for electric scooter offences and a series of confirmation orders for Córas Iompair Éireann pension and superannuation schemes. Copies of the minimum wage order are sold through Government Publications at Mountshannon Road, Kilmainham, Dublin 8, at a price of €4.50.

What it means

For workers paid at or near the floor, the order sets the minimum ordinary hourly rate that must appear on their payslips from the first pay period of 2027, and it caps the amounts that can be reckoned for board and lodgings where those are provided. For employers — particularly in hospitality, retail, cleaning, agriculture and care, where the floor rate reaches a large share of the workforce — the ten-week window between publication and commencement is the period in which rates of pay, contracts and budgets must be brought into line with S.I. No. 533 of 2026.

Source: Iris Oifigiúil, Number 85, 23 October 2026, Section I (official reference: S.I. No. 533 of 2026).