The subsistence minimum is being abolished in Ukraine: what will change in the right to social assistance?

In Ukraine, in the near future, they are planning to reshape the foundations of social policy, and this time they took the scissors seriously. The government intends to reform social security systems, and one of the main issues should be the living wage. More precisely, it is planned to be gradually relegated to the past as an irrelevant and conditional indicator that has long since lost contact with reality. Quietly, without too much noise, the authorities admit the obvious: this number has long had nothing to do with survival, let alone a decent life. However, the beautiful wording hides real risks, because the cancellation will not automatically improve the lives of Ukrainians.

Social Arithmetic: Why Living Wage Doesn’t Work Anymore

Systemic changes in the field of social security are brewing in Ukraine, which can affect millions of citizens. For the first time in a decade, the state officially recognizes what experts and society have been talking about for a long time: the living wage, as a basis for calculating social benefits, has completely lost touch with reality. It is planned to gradually withdraw it from circulation, replacing it with the so-called poverty threshold.

About the preparation of this reform stated First Deputy Minister of Social Policy Daria Marchak. According to her, there are several types of living wage in Ukraine at the same time: separately for children, the working population and pensioners. They serve as the basis for calculating pensions, scholarships, social benefits, fines, court fees and even salaries in the public sector. However, in fact, such payments are nothing more than a formality. As Marchak explains, the real living wage today is twice as high as the officially approved one. In other words, the state deliberately uses numbers that do not provide even the minimum conditions for survival.

This discrepancy between official statistics and reality has turned the social system into a set of fictitious rules. Payments have become meager, the criteria for awarding aid have turned out to be opaque, and support often goes to those who are not in a critical situation. We are watching how the very logic of “social justice” has been completely devalued.

Today, the Verkhovna Rada is considering a draft law that should become the first step in dismantling this system. He proposes to move from the subsistence minimum to a more flexible and, according to the initiators, more objective criterion, which was described as the “poverty threshold”. As the people say, “Danilo didn’t die, the pain crushed him.”  The promises sound confident: the new approach will make it possible to more accurately identify those who really need support, and therefore more efficiently allocate public resources.

However, before making high-profile decisions, officials should understand that it is not only about the technical replacement of one indicator with another. Society is worried about the question of whether the state will finally become responsible in its social policy, or whether it will once again replace the reforms with cosmetic changes, leaving the main problem, which manifests itself in the state’s indifference to the life of a particular person, out of sight.

A concrete minimum in a changing reality

The living wage in Ukraine is officially considered a basic social benchmark, i.e. a figure that should reflect the cost of an elementary set of goods necessary for survival: food, clothing, basic services, medicine. These are all things without which a person will not be able to live and function properly. It is formed on the basis of a consumer basket, and the rules of this “mathematics of survival” are established by the law “On subsistence minimum”, which has been in force since 1999. The law is old, as are the approaches to calculation.

Probably, precisely because of outdated standards, in practice this minimum has long ceased to fulfill its stated function. The Budget Code also underlines the situation by the fact that if the new state budget has not yet been adopted, the subsistence minimum is temporarily left at the level of December of the previous year. Formally, this approach acts as a guarantee of stability, but in fact, it is only a way to maintain a convenient fiction for the state a little longer.

For 2025, these “minimum guarantees” have the following appearance:

– for children under 6 years old — 2,563 hryvnias,
– for children from 6 to 18 years old — 3196 hryvnias,
– for able-bodied persons — 3,028 hryvnias,
– for people who have lost their ability to work — 2,361 hryvnias.

So, the average value is 2,920 hryvnias per month.

It is obvious that such sums have long had nothing to do with the real expenses of a person in Ukrainian conditions. No store, pharmacy or utility takes these numbers into account when forming their prices. But they are still the basis of many social calculations, from pensions to fines. And here we are observing not just an outdated indicator, but an example of how the state for years recorded in official documents something that has long since ceased to exist in everyday life.

A paradox has developed in Ukraine: prices are rising, the standard of living is falling, and the subsistence minimum remains stable, like a concrete slab. Its official meaning has hardly changed over the years, although the country has experienced a shock devaluation, full-scale war, waves of displacement of millions of people, destruction of the economy and infrastructure. However, in government documents, everything looks as if it is stable: neither inflation, nor the collapse of incomes, nor mass poverty affect this paper “minimum”.

While for data Center for Economic Strategy with reference to the research of the sociological company Info Sapiens, in June 2025 the share of Ukrainians living below the poverty line reached 25.2%. That is, every fourth inhabitant of the country found himself in conditions of extreme financial hardship, forced to significantly limit himself even in the most necessary things, including food.

According to the international methodology of the UN, the category of poor includes those whose income does not exceed five dollars a day, that is, less than 150 dollars a month. And although official statistics in Ukraine state that the poverty level is 25.2%, this figure is, to put it mildly, underestimated.

First, everything depends on the chosen method. And in Ukraine, they like to be “flexible” with calculations. When necessary, specialists use one formula, when it is not profitable – a completely different one. Second, poverty does not disappear with the reduction of unemployment in official reports. People are not getting richer en masse, they just don’t want to be registered at employment centers, especially men, who are afraid of getting caught by military commissars. And this has nothing to do with the economy, but rather with a social strategy of survival.

Against this background, the fact that all key social standards, i.e. living wage, minimum wage, pension, are frozen until 2028, looks particularly cynical. Probably, according to the logic of officials, the cost of living will not increase in the next few years. In reality, two thousand hryvnias cannot cover even basic needs, not to mention medicine or education. And at the same time, the salaries of officials, judges, prosecutors and top managers of state bodies for some reason remain tens, and sometimes even hundreds of times higher than these “minimum standards”.

It should be understood that the so-called “poverty level” in Ukraine is not a systematic model, carefully collected data on consumer needs, income or expenses. Rather, it is a conditional guideline that has neither real application nor practical consequences. The entire system of social measurement is reduced to formalities that do not provide any tool for real influence on the quality of people’s lives.

And while there is no unified logic and coordination in social policy, everything works as a chaotic mechanism: each department lives in its own reality, calculations do not match, and indicators have a greater impact on the moral state of society than on its material situation. On paper, we have certain poverty limits, but these limits are not binding. They do not give a person the right to a discount on utility services, nor guaranteed access to free medicines, nor food cards or targeted subsidies for children.

But the main thing, perhaps, is that our officials are not responsible for such inaction. No official has linked his career or mandate to reducing poverty in the country. No one promises to resign if the situation does not improve in four years. No one measures the effectiveness of social policy by the number of people who got out of poverty, rather than staying in it with a new certificate.

The true measurement of poverty must always be individual. Income alone cannot show the whole picture. At least five to six parameters must be taken into account: health status, presence of chronic diseases, housing conditions, number of dependents, access to work, level of savings and assets. Only the combination of these factors gives an idea of the real level of well-being of a specific person, and not of an abstract social group. So far, such approaches are not used in Ukraine, and poverty indicators themselves remain only a tool for reporting, not for action. This does not reduce the number of those who live beyond the limit of survival, and it is more convenient to keep silent about them.

According to experts, the situation will not change until the government starts working on the development of the economy, and not on maintaining the status quo. Social security reforms should contribute to the creation of conditions under which this minimum will at least correspond to the cost of living. Without an increase in salaries and pensions, tax changes and a revision of the salary pyramid in the public sector, no “improvement” will go beyond the presentation slides.

Real support without a living wage: the experience of foreign countries

It is worth going beyond the Ukrainian model in order to understand: the living wage itself is not a universal tool. In many developed countries, such a concept simply does not exist. And the point is not that there is no poverty there, but simply that the approaches to its measurement and countermeasures are radically different.

For example, Germany does not have a fixed living wage in the Ukrainian sense. There they use the concept of “minimum existence” (the basic amount of resources that are necessary for life – ed.). But it is not formally attached to social payments. The state starts from real costs and adapts these thresholds every year. In parallel, a wide system of targeted assistance works: housing subsidy, support for single parents, compensation for energy sources, supplementary payments for the unemployed, programs for low-income families.

Another approach has been developed in France, according to which, instead of a single number of subsistence minimum, there is a concept of “social minimum security”, where each category receives what corresponds to its situation. The government regularly reviews the amount of benefits, tying them to the increase in the cost of living.

In the Scandinavian countries, the model is even more flexible. It’s not about survival at all, instead the focus is on quality of life. Social systems are built to prevent poverty, not to register it. High taxes are redistributed through well-established support mechanisms in various areas, i.e. education, health care, childcare, unemployment benefits. This keeps people from falling below a certain level.

In Great Britain, there is also no fixed living wage in the classic form. Instead, there is a “living wage”, the so-called living wage, which is calculated by independent organizations based on the cost of living in a specific region. At the same time, the state uses the “Universal Credit” system, which combines several types of payments into one, depending on the specific life situation (income, children, housing, disability, etc.).

It is interesting that indicators of social isolation, digital inequality, access to quality education and medicine are also actively used in Britain, the indicators of which are taken into account in welfare calculations. Living wage as a static amount is simply not needed there.

Poland is an example geographically closer to Ukraine, but noticeably different in terms of approaches. There is a system of social minimum (minimum socjalne), which is calculated by the Institute of Labor and Social Affairs. It does not have the direct force of law, but serves as a guideline for support programs. It is important that in Poland, social benefits are not tied to a single amount, but are flexibly formed according to the needs of the family: for children, for care, for disability, housing subsidies, etc.

In addition, Poland actively invests in preventive tools for combating poverty: career guidance, retraining, employment through local social centers, that is, it not only “extinguishes” the consequences, but also works to anticipate them.

Thus, in most European countries, the living wage is not a fixed amount that is used for everyone. Dynamic support systems work there, focused on specific life circumstances, and not on the average survival model. But the most important thing, perhaps, is that these systems live and change together with society, and do not preserve problems under the guise of a “social standard”.

Ukraine still remains in the model of the 90s: with numbers that do not mean anything, and mechanisms that have not worked for a long time. And as long as we focus on formal thresholds, instead of building a living social policy, the living wage will remain not a guideline, but an illusion.