The Baltic picture no longer moves in one direction. Estonia reported the strongest result in the region in 2025, with its gender pay gap falling to a record low. Latvia moved the other way, posting a clear year-on-year widening and the widest fresh Baltic reading in the checked material. Lithuania remains the harder case: the issue is clearly present, but the latest material sits across different statistical layers rather than in one fresh national 2025 headline release.
Estonia
Data card
2025 gender pay gap: 12.2%
Men’s average gross hourly pay: €13.0
Women’s average gross hourly pay: €11.4
Change over 15 years: -10.7 percentage points
Estonia gives the clearest improvement story. In 2025, the gap in gross hourly pay fell to 12.2%, the lowest level on record. That makes Estonia the strongest short-term performer in the Baltics on this indicator. The result does not mean the problem has disappeared. The widest gaps were still recorded in financial and insurance activities, wholesale and retail trade, manufacturing, and health and social work. The headline improved, but the sector structure still shows clear inequality.
Latvia
Data card
2025 gender pay gap: 16.8%
Year-on-year change: +2.9 percentage points
Private sector: 17.6%
Public sector: 12.3%
Latvia moved in the opposite direction. In 2025, the gender pay gap rose to 16.8%, up 2.9 percentage points from a year earlier. That makes Latvia the widest fresh Baltic case in the checked material. The biggest sector gaps were in arts, entertainment and recreation, health and social work, financial and insurance activities, and information and communication. The narrowest gaps were in public administration, transport and storage, real estate, and education.
The Latvian breakdown also shows why the headline needs context. Among full-time workers, the gap narrowed to 14.3%, but among part-time workers it widened sharply to 18.8%. The smallest gap was among workers under 25, while the largest differences were in the 35-44 and 45-54 age groups. So Latvia’s 2025 result is not just a simple male-female comparison. It also reflects sector mix, age structure, and employment format.
Lithuania
Data card
Official detailed national benchmark: 11.1% in 2022
Comparable Eurostat figure in the checked material: 10.0% in 2024, provisional
Current February 2026 labour-market report: no hourly gender pay-gap headline
Lithuania is harder to place in exactly the same frame. The February 2026 labour-market report breaks data down by sex for unemployment and registration, but not for hourly pay. So the current operational labour-market publication cannot be used the same way as Estonia’s and Latvia’s fresh national gender pay-gap releases.
The official Lithuanian statistics page does publish a gender pay gap indicator, but in the checked material the visible detailed national benchmark is still 2022, when the gap in the whole economy stood at 11.1%, unchanged from 2021. For cross-country comparison, the newer figure available in the checked material is Eurostat’s 2024 value of 10.0%, but that number is provisional. This is why Lithuania should not be presented as neatly alongside Estonia’s and Latvia’s 2025 national releases.
That is also why Lithuania’s broader equality publications should stay in context, not in the core comparison line. They are useful for the wider discussion of inequality, but they are not the same thing as the narrow hourly gender pay gap used for direct Baltic comparison.
Data basis: Estonia national 2025 hourly gender pay-gap release; Latvia CSB provisional 2025 hourly gender pay-gap release; Lithuania February 2026 labour-market report; Lithuania official detailed earnings benchmark for 2022; Eurostat 2024 comparable figure marked provisional in the checked material.
Comparison method: unadjusted gender pay gap in gross hourly earnings where directly comparable; Lithuania’s broader equality-index materials are treated as context only, not as a substitute for the hourly-pay indicator.