Algeria's 2027 Wage Increase: What the Finance Bill Hides From Workers

1The 2027 Finance Bill in Figures: Record Spending, a Deficit Funded at Home

The bill forecasts 2027 budget revenue of around DZD 9,251 billion against expenditure of DZD 17,883 billion. Revenue, in other words, covers only 52% of spending, leaving a deficit of roughly DZD 8,631 billion, or 16.2% of gross domestic product. Nor is this a one-off. The government's own tables project deficits of about DZD 9,535 billion in 2028 and DZD 8,968 billion in 2029, all based on a reference oil price of around $60 a barrel.

Nowhere does the bill say how this deficit will be financed. Meanwhile, the Revenue Regulation Fund (FRR), set up precisely to cover Treasury shortfalls and reduce public debt, held only about DZD 96 billion at the end of 2025, enough to cover roughly 1% of the 2027 deficit. The explanatory statement for Article 222 hints at where the Treasury is looking. It describes the balances held in the postal current accounts (CCP) of citizens and businesses as funds that fall within the Treasury's remit and are at its disposal, and proposes to stop booking them as Treasury securities, on the grounds that this will help restore budgetary balance.

A study by economist Abdelrahmi Bessaha estimates that, without far-reaching reforms, public debt will climb from 53.2% of GDP in 2026 to 75.4% in 2030. When a deficit of this size is financed by domestic borrowing, the cost ultimately lands on people who live on a fixed wage, whether through higher prices or through deteriorating public services. Any pay rise that is not matched by genuine price control is therefore eaten away before it ever reaches workers' pockets.

2What Will Cost More in 2027?

At the same meeting, the President also instructed the government not to introduce any tax that would hurt the purchasing power of middle-class and low-income citizens. The bill nonetheless contains a series of measures that will hit household budgets directly. The most significant are set out below.

• Fuel pricesFuel prices (Article 218))This article allows the relevant authorities to revise fuel prices where necessary, without setting a price or a date, and without the change having to go through Parliament. There is a recent precedent: prices went up on 1 January 2026 with no prior announcement, from DZD 45.62 to DZD 47 a litre for petrol, from DZD 29.01 to DZD 31 for diesel, and from DZD 9 to DZD 12 for LPG.
• The annual vehicle tax(Article 42))The tax sticker, known locally as the vignette, rises to DZD 40,000 for cars rated at 10 fiscal horsepower or more and under three years old, and to DZD 30,000 for those between three and six years old.
• Buying a home or property(Article 35))The land registration duty on property transfers rises to 2.5% of the property's value, and several flat fees charged by land registries are doubled.
• Subscriptions and digital services(Articles 46, 48 and 58))Services such as streaming, music, cloud storage and software sold through Algerian or foreign e-commerce platforms become subject to VAT, a tax that ultimately falls on the subscriber.
• Tobacco and alcohol(Articles 50, 62 and 126))The additional tax on tobacco goes up by ten dinars a pack, and the domestic consumption tax on beer rises by between 25% and 37%.

On the other side of the ledger, the bill extends until 31 December 2029 the customs reductions and tax exemptions on staple foods and on livestock imported for fattening, as well as the VAT exemption on fixed-line internet services. These measures, however, merely preserve the status quo. They restore nothing of what wages have already lost, while the measures listed above place new burdens on the very same households.

3A Parliament That Does Not Debate, and Silence on the Cost of Living

The finance bill ought to be the most important political debate of the year, because it decides who pays and who benefits. The 2027 bill, however, is going through in conspicuous silence. As of 11 October 2026, neither the APN nor the Prime Minister's office had announced when it would be tabled, and the text had not been officially made public, according to a specialist platform that tracks its progress step by step. Workers have learned what it contains only from press reports and from a complete transcription of the text posted on GitHub..

The APN's Finance and Budget Committee began its work on the bill with a preparatory meeting on 11 October, followed by a presentation by Finance Minister Mohamed Lamine Lebbou on 12 October. The announced schedule made no mention of hearing from workers' representatives or independent unions, and official reports on the opening of the review said nothing about Article 218 or about how the deficit will be financed. This is an Assembly that emerged from the legislative elections of 2 July 2026, on a turnout of only about 21%, one of the lowest in the country's history.

The Constitution already leaves MPs little room to manoeuvre. Article 146 requires Parliament to pass the finance law within 75 days, failing which the President enacts it by ordinance. Article 147 declares inadmissible any bill or amendment from members of Parliament that would reduce public revenue or increase public spending, unless it is accompanied by offsetting measures. On that basis, the Constitutional Court struck down four amendments in November 2024 that MPs had added to the 2025 finance law, including one that softened the increase in the vehicle tax. The outcome of the parliamentary debate is therefore settled in advance. An MP cannot propose a single extra dinar for wages, or the abolition of a single tax, without also proposing a new source of revenue or a cut elsewhere. Today's silence is simply the logical extension of a Parliament whose oversight role has shrunk almost to nothing.

4A Pay Rise by Presidential Decree: A Promise With No Legal Basis, Contradicted by the Finance Bill

According to published reports, the President stated that 53% of the promised increases have yet to be paid, and that payment would begin in 2027, in one or two instalments depending on circumstances and available resources. The remaining 47% had already been applied in annual instalments covering some 2.8 million public-sector workers. Yet this commitment is nowhere to be found in the bill. No article sets the size of the increase, the date it takes effect or who is entitled to it, and nothing published about the decision mentions any revision of the guaranteed national minimum wage (SNMG), which has stood at DZD 24,000 a month since January 2026.

In practical terms, private-sector workers, minimum-wage earners and pensioners still have no written guarantee that their situation will improve in 2027. The contradiction becomes sharper when this promise is set against what the bill actually contains. A government instructed not to introduce any tax that hurts purchasing power is sending Parliament a text that raises the vehicle tax and the land registration duty, brings digital subscriptions into the VAT net and hands the authorities an open-ended licence to raise fuel prices. Moreover, a pay rise that is not budgeted for, in a budget already DZD 8,631 billion in deficit, can only be financed through domestic borrowing, and workers will end up paying for that borrowing through higher prices.

All of this is happening without any social dialogue whatsoever. The decision was announced in the Council of Ministers without any prior consultation with independent unions. This runs counter to the principle of tripartism on which the International Labour Organization (ILO) was founded, a principle enshrined in Convention No. 144 on tripartite consultation, which Algeria ratified in 1993. It is one of the conventions covered by the observations COSYFOP submitted to the ILO Committee of Experts in August 2026. A wage is not a handout granted at the discretion of one party. It is a right that should guarantee workers and their families a decent standard of living, as set out in Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights andArticle 7 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights , which Algeria ratified in 1989.

5The UGTA: Praise, but No Scrutiny and No Demands

Against this official silence, one might have expected the General Union of Algerian Workers (UGTA), the long-established federation that presents itself as the government's social partner, to go through the bill line by line and defend workers against the burdens it contains. Instead, its secretary general, Amar Takjout, told the daily El Khabar on 7 October that the start of the new social season had been calm and stable. He recalled the President's pledge to raise wages by 100% in 2027 and called for purchasing power to be protected through tighter market controls and support for agricultural production. He said nothing about Article 218, the new taxes or the absence of any figures or dates in the bill.

The UGTA official responsible for economic disputes, quoted by the daily Ech-Chaab, went no further than hoping that the increases would reach more categories of workers and that prices would be brought under control. It was the same approach the union took in its statement of October 2025, when it praised the President's decisions, applauded his report on falling inflation and merely expressed the hope that the 2026 increases would extend to the business sector, the minimum wage and pensions. In December 2025, Takjout described the increase in the minimum wage to DZD 24,000 as a positive, responsible and courageous decision, even though, according to COSYFOP's survey, that amount does not even cover the basic food basket of a family of four.

The contrast shows the limits of this role. The same union that publicly opposed, for the first time in its history, the draft law on the exercise of trade union rights in January 2023, and that announced in October 2025 that it was setting up committees to bring its statutes into line with Law 23-02, has nothing to say today about a text that directly affects the pay packets of millions of workers. In COSYFOP's view, this is exactly what is driving a growing number of activists, who have given up hope of changing things from within, to join the independent unions. Despite being shut out, these unions remain the true voice of the rank and file.

6COSYFOP's Position: No Real Pay Rise Without Dialogue, and No Dialogue Without Independent Unions

COSYFOP rejects the continued practice of unilateral decisions by the President of the Republic on wages. It considers that raising wages without dialogue with independent unions, while prices keep climbing and while the government fails to present its annual statement of general policy to the people's elected representatives, as Article 111 of the Constitution requires, amounts to nothing more than window dressing.

Workers' purchasing power has collapsed on an unprecedented scale, and poverty has become the daily reality for a large number of Algerian families who, until recently, counted themselves as middle class. This is borne out by the field survey COSYFOP published on 20 September 2026 , based on price checks in markets across six provinces (wilayas). The survey found that 17 of the 18 comparable products were selling above the average official price, with a median gap of 15.2%. A basic food basket for a family of four costs DZD 34,150 a month, equivalent to 156% of the net minimum wage (DZD 21,840). The family's full monthly budget ranges from DZD 74,669 for homeowners to DZD 118,055 for those renting in the capital.

On this basis, COSYFOP has proposed, as a first step, raising the guaranteed national minimum wage to DZD 35,000 gross from 2027. According to the survey, this is what a single worker with no housing costs needs each month. This should be followed by genuine tripartite wage negotiations with the independent unions, a regular mechanism for reviewing the minimum wage, an update of the public-sector index point, which has been frozen since 2007, and the creation of a permanent cost-of-living observatory. Despite the wide attention the survey received, none of these demands has found its way into the decisions of the Council of Ministers.

Announcing wage increases without first consulting workers' representatives is a refusal to listen to workers and their rank and file.

Trade Union Confederation of Productive Forces

7The 35,000 Dinar Campaign: Collective Action Is the Only Real Guarantee

With a Parliament boxed in by constitutional limits, an official union federation content to applaud, and decisions taken unilaterally, workers have only one option left: to make their voices heard directly and collectively. That is why COSYFOP has launched a national petition in the form of a collective letter to the President of the Republic. The letter calls for the guaranteed national minimum wage to be raised to DZD 35,000 and for this measure to form part of a genuine and comprehensive social dialogue with the unions on wages, purchasing power and related social policies.

The petition is open until 25 December 2026. The letter will be formally delivered to the Presidency on 29 December 2026, together with the total number of confirmed signatures, and nothing else. COSYFOP is committed to never publishing signatories' personal details or passing them on to the Presidency or any other body. A signature counts only once it has been confirmed through the link sent by email.

The weight of this letter will depend not only on the justice of its demand, but on the number of people standing behind it. Every additional signature makes the workers' voice harder to ignore, and every worker who persuades a colleague to sign widens the circle of pressure. A pay rise handed down from above and then clawed back through prices is no substitute for a right won through organization, solidarity and collective action.

?Frequently Asked Questions About the 2027 Wage Increase