With the amount of National Insurance (NI) paid by employers going up from today, Britons will be smarting.
However, a shocking new analysis suggests that Britain would be worse off if we had stayed in the EU as the supranational body is imposing even harsher measures on its people without having to answer to them.
It comes as UK employers will have to pay NI at 15 per cent on salaries above £5,000 from April 6.
At the moment businesses pay a rate of 13.8 per cent on employees' earnings above £9,100 a year.
Although workers will not be immediately impacted by these NI increases, many will pay more tax overall because the points at which people start paying - or move to higher rates - have not increased in line with inflation.
The most expensive country for employment is France
Facts4EU
Whilst the EU equivalent of National Insurance is not currently on the table, the trend has been firmly in the direction of imposing these measures on the whole bloc.
The evidence for this is in the Withdrawal Agreement which the EU imposed on the UK on its effective departure from the bloc on 31 December 2020, at the end of the ‘Transition Period’.
In the course of the negotiations, the EU tried to insist the UK could not diverge from its so-called ‘level playing field’ – particularly in the area of employment.
The EU’s insistence on the UK maintaining a level playing field involved areas such as labour and social standards, competition and trade, state subsidies, nationalised industries, tax policy, environmental measures, and of course climate change.
Much of the talk was around the subject of ‘dynamic alignment’, which essentially meant keeping in lock-step.
As a result of the EU’s stances, the compromise agreement - when eventually reached - favoured the EU. There is no remotely similar international agreement anywhere else in the World.
An analysis of the spiralling labour costs of member states by Facts4EU suggests Britain dodged a bullet.
The latest figures released on Friday afternoon (28 Mar 2025) by the EU Commission’s official statistics agency show the cost of employment across all 27 member countries.
Not only do they show the huge disparity in average hourly wages between these member countries, they also reveal the extra labour cost per hour after stripping out the wages element.
The most expensive country for employment is France (see chart above). This reflects the amount of ‘social provision’ doled out in President Emmanuel Macron’s country.
To demonstrate that the EU cannot maintain a level playing field on the core component of a business’s cost-base, Facts4EU looked first at the total of those elements of the average labour cost per hour after stripping out the wage paid to the employee.
This part is referred to as ‘net social contributions’ and includes employers' actual social contributions, households' actual social contributions, imputed social contributions and households' social contribution supplements. Social insurance scheme service charges are deducted from the items above to reach net social contributions.
There is a huge disparity in average hourly wages between EU countries
Facts4EU
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Here, the disparity between the averages for different EU countries leaves the realms of a ‘gaping divide’ (see the chart on total labour costs per hour below) and stretches into a ‘yawning chasm’. To reiterate, this is the part of overall labour costs per hour which is the non-wage element.
This part costs a scarcely credible 23 times more in France (€14.00/hr) than it does in Romania (€0.60/hr). This very clearly shows what is always said about France.
Its economy is burdened with excessive payments for its bloated social state, which goes some way to explaining why France – the No.2 economy in the EU - is in increasing difficulties with its current deficit and therefore with the financial markets.
Total labour costs per hour is 23 times higher in France (€14.00/hr) than Romania (€0.60/hr).
Facts4EU
On average, it costs over five times as much to employ the average worker in Luxembourg than in Bulgaria
Facts4EU
As the EU itself says: “The average hourly labour costs mask significant gaps between EU countries.” With the cost in Luxembourg 5.2 times as much as in Bulgaria, the ‘gap’ might be described as a gaping divide rather than as ‘significant’.
Taking the EU27 overall, as one entity, the average total hourly labour cost works out at €31.80 per hour. That said, given the massive disparities between the 27 EU countries, an average is meaningless.
It is obvious at a glance that when it comes to ‘labour and social standards’, the EU has no such thing as a ‘level playing field’.
As Facts4EU's analysis shows, Rachel Reeves’ increase in employers’ national insurance contributions and in the minimum wage is a bitter pill to swallow, the British electorate can punish the Government at the ballot box. EU members do not have that same recourse.
