Milei doubles pay for Cabinet ministers via presidential decree

Cabinet Chief Manuel Adorni and his fellow Cabinet ministers are now picking up a gross monthly paycheque of 7,272,091 pesos (around US$5,210), thanks to a decree signed by President Javier Milei.

The data emerges from an government report, which Perfil accessed via a request filed under Law 27,275 (Access to Public Information), which details that this sum consists of a basic salary of 3,300,233 pesos and a complement of 3,971,858 pesos due to the responsibility of the post.

The document, elaborated by the government’s Dirección Nacional de Sistemas y Estadísticas de Empleo Público y Política Salarial pay board, makes it clear that this pay scale covers the Cabinet chief, all ministers and the senior government authorities across various positions (Decrees 838/94, 1716/92 and 140/07), i.e. secretaries, undersecretaries and officials of equivalent rank. 

The updating of salaries was the direct consequence of Decree 931/2025, signed by President Javier Milei on the last day of last year, which transferred to the government helm the increases agreed in the state collective bargaining of 2024 and 2025. 

President Milei and his Vice-President Victoria Villarruel are excluded from this norm with their salaries still frozen.

Prior to that decision, the salaries of senior officials, including Adorni, remained at the levels fixed under Decree 235/2024, frozen with reference to December 2023. Up until last January, Adorni and the other ministers earned 3.5 million pesos. The application of these accumulated increases implied a significant recovery which, measured in nominal terms, has doubled the earnings of the political helm in little more than a year.

The pay hike arrives with Adorni and his personal finances under intense court and media pressure. The first focus of this conflict was registered last February 15 when the evolution of his assets was publicly questioned. From that point different lines of investigation have been opened up, covering the acquisition of property, inconsistencies between his declared earnings and spending (including credit cards) and possible conflicts of interest derived from his state role.

Among the most relevant files is one case linked to the use of official funds for travel, in particular his recent trip to New York, together with his wife Betina Angeletti, who travelled at least one leg of the journey on the presidential plane. The file was finally shelved last week by federal judge Daniel Rafecas after the intervention of prosecutor Ramiro González, concluding that there were not sufficient elements to sustain a criminal indictment. 

Nevertheless, other cases continue in a stage of preliminary investigation in different federal courtrooms with requests for information on his property cross-checked against tax data and measures geared to reconstruct the evolution of his assets.

Contrast

The evolution of the salaries of senior officials contrasts with the dynamics of the wider economy. 

The purchasing power of Argentina’s minimum wage workers diminished 39 percent between November 2023 and last March according to the “Panorama of formal wage employment and its remuneration” report of the Instituto Interdisciplinario de Economía Política (IIEP) of the University of Buenos Aires Economics Faculty. Nevertheless, those adjustments remained below the annual inflation rate.

Both public employees and pensioners suffered a marked loss of purchasing power. The estimates coincide with state workers registering falls in real terms of some 30 percent (according to a report of ATE state workers union) while pensions lost out by around 20 percentage points against the rise of prices. The INDEC national statistics bureau further informed that last year formal wages lost over two percent of their real purchasing power against inflation.

Last year the minimum pension lost around 4.6 percent of its purchasing power to inflation, owing to the accompanying bonus of 70,000 pesos being frozen. In contrast, pensions above the minimum remained stable with a marginal improvement of 0.4 percent in what was practically a draw with inflation.

The difference with the earnings of the political helm lies in their incomes being automatically updated with accumulated collective bargaining, a mechanism which other sectors cannot replicate with equal efficacy.