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First modification: 02/16/2026 - 15:31

For this Monday, the parties were called to agree on the new increase, after days before the Council of State provisionally suspended the decree by which President Gustavo Petro established a 23% adjustment, criticized by broad sectors. The president also called for marches throughout the country for next Thursday to reject the high court's measure.

The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, announced on Sunday, February 15, that in the new decree that he will issue in the coming days on the minimum wage, ordered by the Council of State, he will maintain the value of what he calls "living wage" for 2026, which was set at two million pesos (about $546), and he did not rule out that this figure could be modified.

"Given that this is a sentence that they order us, I am going to accept that a transitional decree is generated," said Petro in an address to the country about the 23.7% increase in the minimum wage, decreed at the end of last December and criticized by some sectors that consider it exaggerated because it does not adjust to the economic reality of the country.

According to Petro, "the new decree will maintain a living wage," although he clarified that, to comply with the demands of the Council of State, the highest court for administrative litigation, he will present new studies that justify the increase in the minimum wage.

"Only with the economic realities that since the day I signed (the decree) support that we were not wrong, but that the decreed living wage can be modified according to the new economic realities," he added.

Petro did not give details of how the minimum could be modified, but this Sunday reports circulated in local media that the president could raise the "living wage" even further, up to 2,155,000 pesos (about $589) per month.

Last Friday, January 13, after the Council of State ordered the provisional suspension of the decree that increased the minimum wage by 23.7%, Petro echoed in

"If we want to close the gap now, the minimum living wage should be 2,155,000 pesos per month," Petro wrote.

Meeting with businessmen and unions

In his speech today, the president said that to study the minimum wage he called a meeting of the Concertation Commission for this Monday in which his Minister of Labor, Antonio Sanguino, and representatives of the union movement and the business community will be present.

"We will discuss this with the business community and the working class. A pact can be made, we will undoubtedly listen, but immediately afterwards we will make the new transitional decree, hopefully with the result of a consensus," he said.

The president made it clear "that since the presidential decree of December 31 of last year, in Colombia there is a living wage that is the minimum living wage for a family and is mobile," which indicates that it can vary.

Petro took advantage of the speech to reiterate the invitation to Colombians to take to the streets on Thursday to demonstrate in defense of the minimum wage.

"On Thursday I will wait for you in all the public squares of Colombia, the president calls, to defend the living wage," he said, adding that here not only the legal, economic, and convenience arguments are valid, "but it is also resolved with the strength of the working people" to defend "this enormous historical achievement."

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