Registered wages in Argentina have fallen nearly 13% since President Milei took office in December 2023, according to an inflation index the government itself commissioned and then shelved before putting it into official use -- a far steeper decline than the 8.2% drop shown in the official measure over the same period.
The gap comes down to which consumer price basket is used to adjust wages for inflation. Argentina's statistics agency, INDEC, still calculates the official CPI using a household-spending basket from 2004. A reweighted version, built on a national household expenditure survey from 2017-2018 that better reflects how Argentines actually spend money today, shows registered wages down 12.9% from November 2023 through June 2026, compared with 8.2% under the old methodology. The International Monetary Fund has separately said the two-decade-old basket needs updating.
The reweighted figures, compiled by CIFRA, a research center affiliated with the CTA labor-union confederation, break the decline down by sector: private-sector wages down 8.5%, the public sector overall down 20.8%, national government employees down 40.2%, and provincial public employees down 14.3%. The minimum wage fared worst of all, down nearly 41% under the new measure and now roughly 20% below where it stood in the 1990s.
The government had planned to formally adopt the reweighted methodology at the start of 2026, but reversed course just before the switch, saying it wanted to finish consolidating the broader disinflation effort first. INDEC's official monthly reports continue to use the older basket. Recent official data does show a partial rebound, with registered wages up 1.1% over the three months to June, but that recovery is measured against the same lower 8.2% baseline.
CIFRA's researchers argue that government-imposed caps on collective-bargaining wage increases, used as a tool to help bring down inflation, are a direct driver of the purchasing-power losses their index captures -- a causal claim tied to the government's own disinflation strategy that the government has not directly addressed.