IGBCE - Chemical Industry Salary Calculator 2026

Why the bargaining region matters

"Chemical industry tariff" alone isn't specific enough - you need the table that actually applies to your employer and the period you're asking about. Don't equate the bargaining region with the German state you live in: Nordrhein and Westfalen, for instance, are two separate regions with their own, genuinely different tables, even though both sit inside North Rhine-Westphalia.

Tax calculations use your actual state of residence instead, independent of the bargaining region - that's why the net-pay estimate asks for it separately.

Pay group, occupational variant and step

The pay group (E1 to E13) is the tariff classification of the role. Several regions also split groups E9 through E13 into a commercial and a technical variant with genuinely different, independently confirmed amounts - never treated as interchangeable, and a variant this calculator hasn't independently sourced for a given region simply isn't offered rather than guessed. The step then picks the specific figure within that group (and variant).

Steps don't follow one universal pattern: E1-E4 and E13 are flat figures with no tenure progression at all in every one of the 13 regions; E5 steps at 3 and 6 years; E6-E12 step at 2, 4 and 6 years. Always use whichever steps are actually offered for your specific group.

Part-time: what changes with fewer weekly hours?

A proportional part-time calculation scales the full-time table wage by your contracted hours. Worked example: if full-time in your region is 37.5 hours a week (the case for most regions here) and you work 30 hours, that's 80% of full-time. On an assumed full-time wage of 4,000 EUR, that comes out to 3,200 EUR of monthly base pay.

Eastern Germany is the confirmed exception: its own full-time basis is 38.5 hours a week, with actual contracted hours flexible between 32 and 40, and its own monthly divisor (167.5 instead of 163.1). Additional holiday pay scales with your working hours the same way - but never with a separate personal allowance you enter on top.

What "verified" and "derived" mean here

The current wage table (from April 2025, unchanged through the end of December 2026) comes from the WSI Tarifarchiv for all 13 regions, and was additionally cross-checked directly against North Rhine-Westphalia's own state wage registry for the Nordrhein region - all six published anchor figures matched exactly.

The announced January 2027 (+2.1%) and January 2028 (+2.4%) increases are arithmetically derived for 12 of the 13 regions (the announced percentage applied to the current figure, rounded), labelled accordingly since no published table existed yet when this was built. Nordrhein is the exception: six cells there are the actually published figures, which differ from the naive derivation by up to one euro on a few of them.

An employer can bring either increase forward by three months if confirmed at company level. This calculator only applies that option after you explicitly confirm it, never by default.

Monthly pay and annual gross are different numbers

Your tariff monthly pay is the basis for everything else. Additional annual payments mainly change the yearly total, not your regular monthly pay. The "monthly average" this calculator shows is explicitly a comparison figure: it spreads special payments evenly across twelve months even though they're actually paid in specific months (or, when the payment month isn't fixed, not tied to one at all). Don't mistake that average for your normal month's pay.

The demographic/transformation fund isn't a personal bonus

For 2026 and 2027, employers additionally pay 300 EUR per full-time employee (150 EUR for apprentices) into the company's own demographic/transformation fund - a collective employer contribution, not an automatic personal payout. An individual cash payment only happens if employment-security projects don't need the money and both sides of the works council agree to distribute it instead. This calculator shows the figure for information only, never folded into your annual gross.

Worked example: from monthly pay to the annual total

For a simplified example, assume an unchanged monthly gross of 4,000 EUR, plus an assumed annual cash bonus of 4,000 EUR, additional holiday pay of 1,200 EUR, and a Zukunftsbetrag of 920 EUR paid out fully in cash: 48,000 + 4,000 + 1,200 + 920 = 54,120 EUR total annual cash, a monthly comparison average of 4,510 EUR. If the Zukunftsbetrag is used entirely as time off or pension contribution instead, that total drops to 53,200 EUR. Either way, the regular monthly pay itself stays at 4,000 EUR.

Comparing two job offers

To compare two offers, save one as a baseline scenario, then change a single factor at a time - weekly hours, bargaining region, or pay group - and compare. Always compare regular pay, annual payments and working hours separately rather than just the one annual total: a higher table figure means little if it comes with more hours worked, or special payments treated differently.

Then weigh in what the calculator deliberately doesn't evaluate for you: commute, shift load, growth opportunities, and the pay-group classification your own HR department actually confirms.