Skopje, 8 March 2026 (MIA) - The average pension for women aged 65 or over in the EU was 24.5% lower than that for men. In Macedonia, the average pension for women is 18.2 percent lower than that of men.

According to data from Eurostat in 2024, the largest gaps were recorded in Malta (40.3%), the Netherlands (36.3%) and Austria (35.6%). In contrast, the gap was smallest in Estonia (5.6%), followed by Slovakia (8.4%) and Hungary (9.6%).

In Macedonia, the latest available data from Eurostat refers to 2023, when women’s pensions were 18.2 percent lower than men’s pensions.

In the region, the smallest gap is in Montenegro at 8.3% (2024), followed by Albania at 15.6% (2023), Serbia at 16.8% (2024), Bulgaria at 17.5% (2025), Croatia at 19.3% (2024), while the largest gap is in Greece at 23.8% (2024).

In addition to the calculations based on average pensions, Eurostat also publishes the gender gap using the median pension values, which is the middle value that separates the higher half of pensions from the lower half. Unlike the average, the median is less sensitive to a small number of extremely high or low pension values.

The median pension for women in the EU was 24.9% lower than that for men. The largest gaps in median pensions were recorded in Luxembourg (43.3%), Spain (41.1%) and the Netherlands (39.6%), while the smallest gaps were noted in Estonia (-0.3%), Hungary (0.4%) and Denmark (2.7%).

Photo: MIA archive