Ten Days That Shattered the Silence Around Algeria’s Cost-of-Living Crisis

What the study uncovered

The study rests on a field survey carried out on 14 September 2026 by COSYFOP’s teams and members in the markets of Algiers, Tizi Ouzou, Sétif, Guelma, Oran and Ouargla. The prices displayed on the stalls were then set against the official reference prices published by the regional trade directorates, and the comparison showed that 17 of the 18 products that could be matched directly were selling above the average official price, with a median gap of 15.2%. COSYFOP also released a short video gathering photographs of these prices exactly as the traders wrote them on their own boards, so that readers can see for themselves what people really pay before they ever look at a table.

Nor did the study stop at prices, for it also costed a simple monthly food basket for a family of two parents and two children aged five and ten, which came to 34,150 dinars, or 156% of the net guaranteed national minimum wage (known in Algeria as the SNMG). The same family’s full monthly budget ranges from 74,669 dinars if it owns its home to 118,055 dinars if it rents in Algiers. The minimum wage itself was set by Presidential Decree No. 26-01 of 7 January 2026 at 24,000 dinars gross a month, or 21,840 dinars net once social security contributions are deducted. At that level it covers only between 18% and 29% of the family’s budget, and no more than 63% of the needs of a worker who lives alone and pays nothing towards housing.

The calculations also show that simply restoring what inflation has eaten away from the real value of the minimum wage would mean raising it to around 28,000 dinars gross, a technical benchmark rather than a demand, since it would only give workers back what they have already lost. This is why COSYFOP is calling for the SNMG to rise to at least 35,000 dinars gross as a first step from 2027, a level that would cover about 90% of the budget of a worker living alone with no housing costs. It would still not be enough to support a family, however, even with two such wages coming into the same home.

The demand comes with a set of recommendations, chief among them the opening of tripartite negotiations on a gradual path towards higher wages, and a regular mechanism for reviewing the minimum wage that takes account of inflation, food prices, the needs of workers and their families, and the revenue actually generated by hydrocarbons. COSYFOP is also calling for a rise in the civil service index point, which was set at 45 dinars by Presidential Decree No. 07-304 and has not moved since 2007, and for the trade directorates to be required to publish dated price surveys by province and by market. Finally, it proposes a permanent cost-of-living observatory that would bring together trade unions, consumer associations and the National Office of Statistics and work in line with the International Labour Organization’s methodology.

An echo beyond the border

Far from staying confined to COSYFOP’s website, the study was taken up on 27 September 2026 by the International Labour Network of Solidarity and Struggle, which published a detailed account of its findings in French under the title Le coût de la vie en Algérie, with a direct link to the full text. The prices of Algerian markets were thus put within reach of the trade unionists who belong to the network and of its wider readership, lending the social demands of Algerian workers a solidarity that reaches well beyond the country’s borders.

At the same time, independent journalists took up the study to analyse and explain it, foremost among them Abdou Semmar, founder of the news site Algérie Part, who devoted a detailed episode of his YouTube channel to it. In it he sets a minimum wage of no more than 24,000 dinars against a family budget of 118,000 dinars a month, under a title that sums up the paradox of an Algeria where people grow poorer even as they work. The episode has drawn tens of thousands of views on YouTube alone and has been widely shared by Algerians on social media, carrying the study’s figures out of specialist circles and into a public debate joined by the very citizens who live those figures every day in their shopping baskets.

عبدو سمار يحلل دراسة الكنفدرالية

The local press goes to market

In recent days, local newspapers have begun to break through the wall of fear and open their pages to people’s complaints. No longer content to relay reassuring official statements, they have sent their reporters into the markets to note down prices exactly as they appear on the stalls and to listen to what shoppers have to say about their baskets.

On 27 September 2026, the daily Akhbar El Yaoum published a market report by journalist Nassima Khebadja describing prices sweeping through the street markets like wildfire, with potatoes never dropping below 120 dinars a kilogram all summer, lettuce on sale at 280 dinars, sweet peppers at 180 dinars and a tray of eggs at 670 dinars. One housewife told the paper that she now buys vegetables by the gram rather than by the kilogram to keep her household budget afloat, while another shopper said that fruit had long since vanished from his table and that he now faced soaring prices for vegetables, poultry, eggs and fish as well. Many families, the report noted, have turned to pasta and pulses as an emergency measure to get through the costs of the new school year and the return from the summer break.

That same day, journalist Asma Bahlouli surveyed vegetable prices for Ultra Algeria and found them ranging from 120 to 350 dinars a kilogram, with potatoes and tomatoes at 120 dinars (exactly the figure COSYFOP’s teams had recorded in their field survey two weeks earlier), carrots at 200 dinars, lettuce at 300 dinars and green beans at 350 dinars. On 30 September, Maghreb Émergent gathered the testimony of wholesalers, among them a trader at a daily fruit and vegetable market in Tizi Ouzou province, who said that retailers who used to come to him almost every day now buy only two or three times a week. It is a sign that demand is falling while prices stay high, or in other words that household purchasing power has reached its limit.

In the same spirit, the Algerian consumer protection organisation Himayatek, in a statement issued at the end of September, called for a shift from one-off interventions to permanent and proactive regulation of the market based on clear mechanisms. Its demand echoes COSYFOP’s call for a permanent cost-of-living observatory able to track prices before they explode in people’s faces.

A minister confirms what the study had shown

The issue came to a head at the end of September, when Saïd Sayoud, Minister of the Interior, Local Authorities and Transport, spoke about the surge in prices while installing the new governor of Ksar El Boukhari province. He said that in sixty years of life he had never seen prices like these, expressing astonishment that tomatoes should cost 200 dinars in August, at the very height of their harvest, and added, as reported by El Khabar , that “no one who loves Algerians and Algeria sells tomatoes at 200 dinars in August”. According to Ennahar, he also argued that the record figures announced for agriculture could not be reconciled with potatoes selling at 140 dinars, blamed the multiplication of middlemen for driving prices up several times over and promised that the state would intervene “with the necessary force”. These remarks were picked up by many newspapers and websites, including TSA and, Le Jeune Indépendant andAwras.

This admission confirms the gap the study had identified between the prices people actually pay and the official reference figures, and at the same time undermines the seasonal explanation offered by some traders’ representatives, who put the increase down to a lull between two growing seasons that will end once the October produce arrives. The minister himself, after all, was talking about August prices at the height of the harvest, and potatoes, as Akhbar El Yaoum documented, never fell below 120 dinars all summer. Speaking to Awras , the economist and former member of parliament Ahmed Beldjilali pointed out that the officially announced inflation rate cannot justify an increase on this scale, adding that if field investigations confirm these prices are real, the question becomes one of income itself and whether it needs to be revised. That is precisely the conclusion the study reached, having started from the prices observed in the markets and arrived at the question of wages.

The gap the study exposed is a wage gap before it is a price gap.

Yet the official response remains incomplete, because it reduces the problem to the greed of speculators and middlemen while ignoring its other half, which is wages. Even if prices returned tomorrow to their official levels, the food basket alone would still cost more than the net minimum wage, and that wage would still fall far short of a family’s budget, because the gap the study exposed is a wage gap before it is a price gap. Protecting purchasing power will never be achieved by chasing middlemen alone, and it has to begin with raising wages to a level that allows workers to live from their work with dignity.

From study to signature

This is why COSYFOP has launched a national online campaign to collect signatures on a collective letter to the President of the Republic, calling for the guaranteed national minimum wage to be raised to 35,000 dinars. The aim is for the voice of workers and their families to reach the very top of the state in the language of figures that no one can deny any longer. Signing takes a single minute on COSYFOP’s website, each signature is confirmed by email and signatories’ names are never published, and the campaign remains open until 25 December 2026, with the letter to be sent to the Presidency on 29 December 2026.

The rising cost of living that the minister acknowledges today was documented in the markets by COSYFOP’s teams two weeks ago, and the prices the press is reporting today had already been put in everyone’s hands by the study. What is missing now is for this shared diagnosis to turn into a decision that gives wages back their value. We therefore call on every worker, every family and everyone who believes that work should guarantee a decent life to sign the letter and share it as widely as possible, because every additional signature makes the letter of 29 December stronger and harder to ignore.