The Czech guaranteed wage no longer binds private employers

Not for private employers. Zaručená mzda was abolished for them on 1 January 2025 by zákon č. 230/2024 Sb., the same amending act that rewrote the minimum-wage formula in § 111 zákoníku práce. What the zákoník práce now knows is two instruments, and only one of them reaches a company paying mzda.

The first is minimální mzda, § 111, the single floor that binds every employer in the country, private ones included. The second is zaručený plat, § 112, which applies only to employees paid a plat: the state, territorial self-governing units, state funds and the school legal persons established by the state or a municipality, as listed in § 109 odst. 3.

The statute draws the line in its own wording. § 111 odst. 1 defines the minimum wage as the floor for an employee who has no right to one of the lowest levels of zaručený plat under § 112 odst. 2. An employee of a private company has no such right, so the minimum wage is their floor, and it is the whole of their floor.

The practical effect of the change is that a private employer now has one number to clear instead of a scale to classify roles against. The complexity did not disappear so much as move: it went into the annual formula that produces the rate, and into the question of which parts of pay count towards it. Neither of those is a grading exercise, and neither depends on how skilled or responsible the job is.

Before that change, eight groups of work each carried their own binding minimum and they applied to all employers. That system has gone for the private sector. A page that still presents a graded scale of minimum rates as something a private Czech employer must meet is describing the position as it stood on or before 31 December 2024.

One rate, checked once a year. For 2026 the minimální mzda is 22,400 CZK a month (approximately €920) and 134.40 CZK an hour (approximately €5.52), at 24.350 CZK to the euro, the ČNB fixing for 21 September 2026. Both figures are set by sdělení MPSV č. 356/2025 Sb. and are in force from 1 January 2026.

The rate is no longer negotiated from scratch each autumn. Since 2025 the monthly minimum wage is the Ministry of Finance prediction of next year’s average gross monthly wage multiplied by a government coefficient and rounded up to whole hundreds of koruna, and it can never fall: if the formula produces a figure below the last announced one, the last announced one is re-announced. The hourly rate is derived from the monthly rate rather than set separately. Our post on the Czech minimum wage for 2026 works through the formula and the rate table.

Part-time work scales the floor rather than escaping it. For an employee on a contractually shorter week, the monthly minimum wage is reduced in proportion, so a 20-hour week gives 11,200 CZK a month for 2026 on MPSV’s own worked example, while the hourly rate is unchanged.

For 2027, the rate is set by an MPSV sdělení due by 30 September, and it had not been published when this was written. Any quote that runs into next year should be re-checked against the published sdělení rather than against a press announcement.

Zaručený plat is the graded floor that survived the 2025 change, and it binds only employers who pay a plat rather than a mzda. That is the public sector as listed in § 109 odst. 3 zákoníku práce. For 2026 it has four groups, each a multiple of the minimum wage, reproduced in sdělení MPSV č. 356/2025 Sb.

• Group 1, 1.0 times the minimum wage: 22,400 CZK a month, 134.40 CZK an hour
• Group 2, 1.2 times: 26,880 CZK a month, 161.30 CZK an hour
• Group 3, 1.4 times: 31,360 CZK a month, 188.20 CZK an hour
• Group 4, 1.6 times: 35,840 CZK a month, 215.10 CZK an hour
• All four are 2026 figures and all four are public sector only

Those rates are real and current. What they are not is a private-sector obligation. An employer of record’s clients are private companies, their people are paid mzda, and the only floor those contracts have to clear is 22,400 CZK a month or 134.40 CZK an hour for 2026.

The split follows a distinction Czech law already draws elsewhere. Mzda and plat are different statutory categories of remuneration, not two words for pay: mzda is what a private employer pays, plat is what the bodies in § 109 odst. 3 pay out of public budgets, and the code runs separate rules for each through §§ 111 and 112. Keeping a graded floor on the plat side while removing it from the mzda side is consistent with that structure, which is why the table still exists at all.

The distinction is worth labelling every time the table appears, because the two Czech terms differ by one word and translate into English identically. Zaručená mzda was the private-sector instrument and it is gone. Zaručený plat is the public-sector instrument and it is not.

Because it was correct for years, and because a graded table is easier to write a page around than a single number. Providers that built their Czech content before 2025 carried a scale of minimum rates by category of work, and the update since has often been to refresh the koruna figures rather than to ask whether the instrument still applies. The result is a page with current-looking numbers and a superseded legal premise.

Two versions of the error circulate. One republishes the old eight-group zaručená mzda scale with new figures. The other takes the four-group zaručený plat table, which is genuinely current, and presents it as the minimum a private employer must pay. The second is harder to spot, because the numbers check out against MPSV and only the label is wrong.

The practical effect is a quote built on the wrong floor. A junior role priced against a group 3 or group 4 rate looks legally constrained when it is not, and a client who believes the constraint exists cannot compare offers properly. It also travels: once a pay band is written into a job description, an internal approval or a budget, the wrong premise stays in the file long after the page is corrected.

There are two quick signals that a Czech pay page is stale. One is a graded wage table presented without the word plat anywhere near it. The other is a probation period given as three months, or six for managers, which has been wrong since 1 June 2025. Both point at content written from pre-2025 material, and a page carrying one usually carries the other.

The agreement between the parties, above the statutory floor. Pay is agreed in the pracovní smlouva or set in a mzdový výměr, an internal regulation may add to it, and a kolektivní smlouva may set better terms than the statutory minimum where one applies. Nothing in the current law grades that agreement by the complexity of the work for a private employer.

The floor is tested in a particular way, and that part catches employers out more often than the rate itself does. Several premiums are excluded when checking whether pay reaches the minimum wage: overtime pay, the public holiday premium, the night premium, the difficult working environment premium, the increased-burden premium in healthcare and the Saturday and Sunday premium. An employer cannot use premiums to lift an employee to the minimum. If pay falls short, a doplatek must be paid to bridge the gap, and where the parties have not agreed in advance whether the monthly or the hourly minimum applies, the hourly one is used for the top-up.

One premium is itself commonly mis-stated. For private-sector employees paid a mzda, the difficult working environment premium is at least 10% of the basic minimum wage rate for each aggravating influence, which is 13.44 CZK per hour for 2026, cumulative where several influences are present, with no statutory ceiling. The monthly range published for the same premium in some places is the public-sector plat figure and does not apply to a private employer.

The minimum wage also does work outside the pay line. It is the floor for the health insurance assessment base, so an employee whose base falls below it triggers a top-up of 13.5% of the difference, which is explained in our post on Czech payroll.

Ask which instrument they are quoting, and for which year. A provider who answers minimální mzda, 22,400 CZK a month for 2026, sdělení MPSV č. 356/2025 Sb., is working from current law. A provider who answers with a category or a group for a private-sector role is working from law that changed on 1 January 2025.

Three further questions separate a current Czech payroll operation from a translated one. Does the quote state which premiums are excluded from the minimum-wage test? Does it say how a shorter week reduces the monthly floor? And does it commit to re-checking the figure against the sdělení each January rather than against a press release in September? Our guide to choosing an employer of record in the Czech Republic has the rest of the list.

It is also worth asking what happens when the floor moves. The minimum wage changes on 1 January, and it changes the health insurance floor and the part-time calculation with it, so a contract signed in November on this year’s figure needs no amendment but the payroll run in January does need the new rate. That is an operational question rather than a legal one, and it is the sort of thing that separates a Czech payroll operation from a translated template.

We employ through our own Czech company, on Czech employment contracts under the zákoník práce, and the wage floor we apply is the one in force for the year the payroll runs in. If you want the arrangement described end to end, it is on Employer of Record Czech Republic.