August the 5th, 2023 – Croatian pensions are infamously small, and a person who earned relatively good money each month unfortunately still naturally expects a huge drop when retirement age comes knocking.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, according to the latest data from the Croatian Pension Insurance Institute, the average pension paid out in July stood at a mere 414 euros. When compared to the average salary of 1,133 euros, the share of Croatian pensions within said salaries is only 36.5 percent.
In other words, after acquiring the conditions for the withdrawal of typical Croatian pensions, retirees in this country can expect their monthly income to amount to only a little more than a third of the salary they used to receive, as reported by tportal.
Because of this, according to Eurostat estimates, almost a third of Croatian retirees are currently being threatened with poverty. Compared to other European Union (EU) countries, the share of the eventual pension in a monthly salary in Croatia is among the lowest in the entire European Union.
Damning Eurostat data
According to Eurostat data, the replacement ratio for pensions at the level of the European Union is 0.58, or 58 percent of a monthly salary. This is the so-called to the aggregate replacement ratio, which represents the ratio between the median individual gross pension of individuals aged 65 to 74 and the median individual gross salary that these people earned between the ages of 50 and 59.
According to the aforementioned indicator, the best conditions for retirement are enjoyed by residents of Luxembourg, who can count on a pension of 89 percent of their monthly salary.
Croatian pensions are lagging more than significantly. In fact, they’re at the very back of the group, along with Bulgaria, Ireland and Lithuania, countries where the replacement ratio remains below 40 percent. At the same time, Lithuania has the lowest ratio of all, and Lithuanian pensioners’ incomes when retiring fall to only a third of what the people drawing them were earning before retiring.
