Council of State: no to restoring public sector bonuses

The Plenary Session of the Council of State ruled, in decision 1201/2026, that the non-restoration of the Christmas and Easter bonuses and of the holiday allowance to public sector employees does not contravene either the Constitution or European Union law. These allowances had been abolished by Law 4093/2012, during the fiscal adjustment, and have since been the subject of continuous legal claims. According to the reports that covered the decision, the case concerns some 700,000 public sector employees, while the particular claim at issue covered the period from 1 January 2023 to 31 December 2024. The applicants had based their arguments, among other things, on European Union Directive 2022/2041 on adequate minimum wages.

As to the exact reasoning, only what has been made public by the outlets that covered the decision is reproduced here, since the full text has not been posted. The main conclusion conveyed is that the abolition was judged compatible both with constitutional guarantees and with European Union law, and that the invocation of the Directive on adequate minimum wages was not accepted as a basis for a claim by public sector employees. Any more detailed rendering of the reasoning before the publication of the full text would be speculation and is not attempted.

The importance of the decision lies in the fact that it comes from the Plenary Session, the highest formation of the country’s supreme administrative court. Its decisions function in practice as binding precedent for the lower administrative courts, which are examining dozens of similar actions across the country. Thus a ruling of this kind does not only close the particular case but also determines the fate of a series of pending cases with the same subject matter. In practice, once the Plenary Session has ruled on a question of principle, pending actions with the same content are as a rule decided in the same way, without a fresh substantive examination of the legal question. The path of these claims began immediately after the bailout-era cuts of 2012 and has passed through successive rounds, with certain categories of employee, such as uniformed personnel and judicial officers, having obtained partial back payments in other cases with a different legal basis.

In practical terms, the decision means that no obligation on the State to restore the thirteenth and fourteenth salary for the period at issue arises through the courts. Any restoration remains a matter of political decision and fiscal space, not of judicial ruling. The publication of the full text is pending, from which the scope of the ruling will become clear and whether it leaves room for different treatment of other time periods or categories of employee. The case is being closely followed by public sector federations and touches on both justice and the economy, as it concerns the pay claims of hundreds of thousands of workers.