Germany’s minimum wage in 2026 and 2027: what it costs a transport service and how to renegotiate

The amounts are set out in section 1 of the Fifth Minimum Wage Adjustment Ordinance. The federal cabinet adopted it on 29 October 2025, following the Minimum Wage Commission’s decision of 27 June 2025, according to the press release of the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. For comparison, the Fourth Minimum Wage Adjustment Ordinance had set 12.41 euros for 2024 and 12.82 euros for 2025.

What happens after that is open. Under section 9 subsection 1 of the Mindestlohngesetz (Minimum Wage Act), the commission decides on the next adjustment every two years. No figure for 2028 has been set yet, but a further increase is the normal case, not the exception.

Minijobs: the threshold moves with the wage

Many operators staff school runs and escort duties with Minijobber, employees in Germany’s marginal employment scheme with reduced social security contributions. Since 2022 the earnings threshold has been tied to the minimum wage: under section 8 subsection 1a of Book IV of the Social Code, the minimum wage is multiplied by 130, divided by three and rounded up to whole euros. That gives 603 euros for 2026 and 633 euros for 2027. For staff paid exactly the minimum wage this stays at roughly 43 hours a month. If you pay above the minimum wage, you need to check after every pay round whether the hours still fit under the threshold.

The example is deliberately simple. It looks only at wages tied directly to the minimum wage and leaves out the vehicle, fuel and overheads. How those blocks add up is covered in the article on the cost per kilometre in a minibus transport service.

• Run: one minibus serving a special needs school, outbound in the morning and return in the afternoon, so two runs per school day
• Driver: 5.5 paid hours per school day, including vehicle checks, approach and waiting time at the school
• Escort: 4 paid hours per school day
• School days: 190 per year. The real number depends on the holiday calendar of the federal state
• Wage: both staff paid exactly the minimum wage
• Employer on-cost: a flat 25 per cent for social security contributions, statutory levies and accident insurance. Depending on the type of employment, your figure will be higher or lower

That gives 1,805 paid hours a year (5.5 plus 4 hours times 190 days). Every cent of minimum wage increase therefore costs 1.25 cents per hour and a little over 22 euros a year.

With ten such runs, that is around 105,000 euros over three years that appeared in no original costing. If you already pay above the minimum wage, the increase still bites: anyone who wants to keep a gap between escort and driver pay has to raise the higher wages as well.

Before thinking about goodwill or legal claims, read your contract. Check whether it contains an adjustment rule, for instance linked to a wage or cost index. How it is worded varies from client to client and often between federal states.

Such clauses are generally permitted. The Preisklauselgesetz (Price Clause Act) prohibits automatic value-protection clauses in section 1 subsection 1, but subsection 2 number 3 expressly exempts Kostenelementeklauseln, cost element clauses under which the price follows the development of costs that directly affect the contractor’s own costs. The wages of driving staff are exactly such a cost element.

• What is the adjustment linked to: the minimum wage, a collectively agreed wage, the consumer price index or a cost index for bus services?
• What weight does the staff cost block carry in the formula?
• Is there a threshold below which nothing is adjusted, for example only from a three per cent change?
• Is the adjustment automatic or only on application, and by when must the application be made?
• From which date does the new price apply: the wage increase, the application or the start of the school year?

For public contracts, the room for changes without a new tender is narrow. Above the EU thresholds, section 132 subsection 2 number 1 of the Act against Restraints of Competition (GWB) permits adjustments that were already set out in the original procurement documents as a clear, precise and unequivocal review clause. Subsection 3 also allows small changes of up to 10 per cent of the contract value for services, as long as the threshold is not exceeded. Below the thresholds, state law applies, and it differs between federal states. Which rules apply to your contract depends on its value and on the EU thresholds for transport service tenders in 2026.

Where there is no clause, the term Störung der Geschäftsgrundlage soon comes up. Section 313 subsection 1 of the German Civil Code (BGB) requires that circumstances have changed significantly after the contract was concluded, that the parties would have concluded a different contract had they known, and that one party cannot reasonably be expected to uphold the contract, taking into account the contractual or statutory allocation of risk.

With the minimum wage, this usually fails at three points.

• Foreseeability. The minimum wage is adjusted regularly by law. The amounts for 2026 and 2027 have been known since the commission’s decision in June 2025 and the ordinance since October 2025. For every contract bid after that, the increase was known.
• Allocation of risk. Under a fixed price, the contractor normally bears the costing risk. Labour costs are the classic example of a risk within the contractor’s own sphere.
• Severity of the change. A rise of a few per cent in the staff cost block makes the contract less attractive for most operators, but not unreasonable in the sense of the provision.

A negotiated adjustment is more realistic. A district council has its own interest in school transport not collapsing in the middle of the school year because an operator gives up. That interest is your lever, not the statute.

In patient transport the situation is different, because remuneration usually does not come out of a tender. Under section 133 subsection 1 of Book V of the Social Code (SGB V), the statutory health insurance funds or their state associations conclude remuneration contracts, unless the fees are set by state or municipal law. Subsection 3 extends this to journeys under the Passenger Transport Act, which includes taxis and private hire. Whether a framework contract with a state association applies in your region or individual contracts with each fund varies widely.

Section 71 subsections 1 to 3 SGB V apply to these contracts. Section 71 SGB V requires remuneration to be set so that contribution increases are ruled out, and caps the agreed change at the change rate determined by the Federal Ministry of Health. For 2027, the ministry set this rate at 3.42 per cent in its notice of 4 September 2026. In addition, the current version of section 71 subsection 3 provides that the calculated result for 2027, 2028 and 2029 is reduced by one percentage point in each year.

At 5.04 per cent, the 2027 minimum wage step is higher. That sounds like a hopeless negotiation, but it is not quite, because the two figures measure different things. The minimum wage rises by 5.04 per cent, while your total cost per journey rises by less, because vehicle, fuel and overheads do not grow at the same rate. If staff paid at minimum wage account for half of your costs, for example, this step raises total costs by a little over 2.5 per cent.

This only holds up with your own figures: the share of minimum wage hours in total hours, the share of staff costs in total costs, duty time per journey. If you can pull these figures from your patient transport software or your payroll, you negotiate with evidence rather than impressions.

1. 1Clarify the contractual basisFind the clause, the application deadline, the reference value and the effective date. For public contracts, also check whether the procurement documents contained a review clause.
2. 2Quantify the extra cost per unit of serviceTake the minimum wage hours per run or per journey from your actual data and multiply them by the wage difference and your real employer on-cost. Shown per run and per school day, the figure is easy for the client’s case officer to follow.
3. 3Adjust only the wage shareDo not ask for a flat five per cent on the total price, but for the increase on the staff cost share. That is more honest and harder to reject.
4. 4Show your own efficiencyDocument what you have already absorbed yourself, for example through regrouped runs or fewer empty kilometres. Clients are more willing to pay the rest when they can see that not everything is being passed on.
5. 5Ask early and in writingDistrict budgets and insurance fund budgets are planned well in advance. A request in the autumn for the turn of the year stands a better chance than an invoice with a new price in January.

For new bids the reverse applies: anyone bidding today for a multi-year contract should treat 14.60 euros for 2027 as a known figure and propose a cost element clause for the years from 2028, where the procurement documents allow it.

You cannot lower the hourly wage, but you can lower the number of paid hours. In the worked example, one hour costs the operator 18.25 euros in 2027. Every minute a driver does not spend waiting for a passenger, driving back empty to the depot or taking detours because of a badly cut run works directly against the increase.

Together, these two levers almost fully absorb the 2027 step of around 1,580 euros. The assumptions are not a promise. They show the order of magnitude. The time saving also only takes effect if working time is paid according to actual duty and not as a fixed shift.

In school transport, the reserves usually lie in how runs are built: children who have moved, new registrations at the half-year, a school that shifts its start time. A run that was optimal in August rarely still is in February. School transport software that recalculates runs with every change and reports driving time and empty kilometres per run delivers both: the saving itself and the figures to prove it to the client.