Since 1 January 2025, private employers in Czechia — hospitality included — owe exactly one statutory wage floor: the minimum wage, set at 22,400 CZK a month or 134.40 CZK an hour for 2026. The “guaranteed wage” (zaručená mzda), which used to set a second, higher floor in eight levels according to a job’s complexity, responsibility and strain, was repealed for the private sector by Act No. 230/2024 Coll., amending the Labour Code. It survives only in the public and state sector, renamed the “guaranteed salary” (zaručený plat), and simplified from eight levels to four.
A restaurant or hotel researching this today will find plenty of content — some of it recent — still describing the old eight-level system as if it binds them. It doesn’t anymore.
What is the guaranteed wage, and does it still bind employers?
Czech labour law has always used two different words for pay, and the 2025 reform made the distinction load-bearing. Mzda (wage) is what private-sector employees are paid; plat (salary) is what public and state-sector employees are paid. Section 111 of the Labour Code (Act No. 262/2006 Coll.) sets the minimum wage, which applies to both. Section 112 used to set a second floor — the guaranteed wage — in eight levels, applying to both sectors as well, based on the complexity, responsibility and strain of the job. A line cook and a kitchen porter, for instance, sat in different levels and so had different legal minimums above the headline minimum wage.
That second floor is gone for the private sector. Act No. 230/2024 Coll. removed the guaranteed wage from the commercial sphere entirely, effective 1 January 2025, leaving the minimum wage as the sole statutory limit on private-sector pay. The public and state sector kept an equivalent mechanism — now called the guaranteed salary — but cut it down to four levels instead of eight.
The split now shows up directly in how the law is enforced. Czechia’s Labour Inspection Act separately prohibits paying an employee less than the minimum wage or less than the guaranteed salary, treating the two as parallel floors for two different labour markets rather than one shared scale.
How the four levels work now — and it’s public sector only
The guaranteed salary applies to civil servants, teachers, and other state and public-sector employees paid a plat. It no longer has anything to do with a restaurant, hotel, or any other business paying a mzda.
Placement into one of the four levels formally follows the employee’s pay grade (platová třída), under government regulations No. 341/2017 Coll. (public services and administration) and No. 304/2014 Coll. (state employees). Substantively, it still runs on the same three criteria as the old eight-level system — complexity, responsibility and strain of the work — with educational attainment used as a practical guide to which pay grade a job falls into. Pay grades 1–2 map to level 1, grades 3–5 to level 2, grades 6–9 to level 3, and grades 10–16 to level 4.
Each level is set as a multiple of the minimum wage: level 1 at 1.0×, level 2 at 1.2×, level 3 at 1.4×, and level 4 at 1.6×. For 2026, that puts the four levels at 22,400, 26,880, 31,360 and 35,840 CZK a month for a standard 40-hour week. The Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (MPSV) has to announce next year’s levels in the Collection of Laws by 30 September each year; the 2026 figures were published as communication No. 356/2025 Coll. on 24 September 2025.
Why this doesn’t touch hospitality anymore — and what still might
A restaurant, hotel or catering business is a private-sector employer. From 1 January 2025 it sits entirely outside the guaranteed-salary system: no complexity levels, no question of which group a waiter who also runs the bar belongs to. One number applies, and it’s the same number that applies to every other private employee in the country.
The live risk for 2026 isn’t underpayment against a floor that no longer exists — it’s relying on payroll advice, contract templates, or internal policy written before the reform, all of which may still describe the old eight-level guaranteed wage as current law. A foreign employer researching Czech pay requirements today has a real chance of surfacing pre-2025 material, since a large share of what’s been published on this topic predates the change.
One place the old logic can genuinely survive: a collective agreement that explicitly wrote the eight-level tiers into its own terms remains contractually binding on the employer who signed it, even though the statutory backing behind those tiers is gone. Repealing a law doesn’t cancel a commitment a business already made in a contract. Separately, the surcharge for work in a harsh or health-damaging environment is a distinct obligation that was never part of the guaranteed-wage system and wasn’t touched by the 2025 reform — it still applies regardless of sector.
Which EU countries still have no statutory minimum wage
A commonly repeated figure puts this at six EU member states. As of January 2026, Eurostat counts five: Denmark, Italy, Austria, Finland and Sweden have no national minimum wage and instead leave pay to sector-level collective bargaining. Cyprus, which used to be grouped with them, introduced a statutory minimum wage on 1 January 2023 and is no longer in that category.
The EU’s Adequate Minimum Wages Directive (Directive (EU) 2022/2041), which member states had to transpose by 15 November 2024, doesn’t require Denmark, Italy, Austria, Finland or Sweden to introduce a statutory minimum. Instead it requires periodic assessment of minimum wage adequacy against reference values such as 60% of the gross median wage or 50% of the gross average wage, and it requires any member state whose collective bargaining coverage falls below 80% to adopt a national action plan for raising it. Denmark sits close to that 80% threshold and has not so far been required to submit one.
Czechia is firmly in the 22-country group that does set a statutory figure. Per Eurostat, its January 2026 minimum wage converts to roughly €924 a month — in the lower-middle band of the EU range, above Bulgaria’s rate at the bottom and well below Luxembourg’s at the top.
Who checks, and what it costs
Enforcement sits with the State Labour Inspection Office (Státní úřad inspekce práce, SÚIP), headquartered in Opava with regional inspectorates across the country, operating under the Labour Inspection Act (Act No. 251/2005 Coll.). Its 2026 inspection plan names pay as a recurring priority: compliance with the minimum wage, correct application of any higher-level collective agreement that binds a given employer, and proper payment of workers on the two short-form work agreements (DPP and DPČ). At least 100 dedicated inspections will test equal pay between men and women using the LOGIB analytical tool, and workplace camera systems are a new focus for 2026. In 2025 the inspectorate carried out close to 6,000 inspections and identified more than 2,300 people working illegally.
The fine for getting pay wrong is specific. Section 26 of the Labour Inspection Act makes it an offence to pay an employee less than the minimum wage, or less than the guaranteed salary where that applies — and the ceiling for that offence is up to 2,000,000 CZK. The same ceiling covers a separate failure to pay the harsh-environment or night-work surcharge. None of this changed in the 2025 reform; only the guaranteed wage’s reach into the private sector did.
Tax adviser Michal Dvořáček, commenting on the reform for BusinessInfo.cz, made the employer reaction plain: the underlying complexity-based logic hasn’t changed, but employers were glad to see it drop away from the private sector, leaving it in force only for state and public employees.
Frequently asked questions
Does the guaranteed salary apply to part-time work?
Yes, for the public-sector employees it still covers — the monthly figures scale down proportionally to a shorter working week, the same way the minimum wage does. It has no application to a part-time hospitality job, since hospitality is outside the system entirely.
Does the guaranteed salary move automatically with the minimum wage?
Yes. Each of the four levels is defined as a multiple of the minimum wage, so the 2026 minimum-wage increase carried straight through to all four guaranteed-salary levels without a separate decision being needed.
Does any of this apply to agency staff?
Agency-placed workers are subject to whichever floor applies to the business they’re placed with. Placed with a private employer, that’s the minimum wage, same as a directly employed colleague. SÚIP’s 2026 plan specifically names employment agencies and the businesses that use them as a joint inspection target, with comparable pay and working conditions between agency and directly employed staff as one of the things it checks.
What about a collective agreement that still promises the old eight levels?
It stays binding as a matter of contract. The 2025 reform removed the statutory requirement, not any higher commitment an employer already made in a collective agreement — a collective agreement can still guarantee employees more than the law requires, and nothing stops it from keeping the old structure in place voluntarily.
Is the guaranteed wage really gone for good in the private sector?
As enacted, yes — Act No. 230/2024 Coll. removed it outright rather than suspending it, and there’s no sunset clause pointing back to the old system. Czech labour law is amended close to every year, so a future reversal isn’t impossible, but nothing in the current law schedules one.