Russia is seeing a rapid rise in unpaid wages: arrears have quadrupled in a year, and workers in construction, mining, and even strategic defense plants say they’re going months without pay. Official statistics show wage delays climbing sharply, even as experts debate whether the surge signals a deeper economic problem or simply reflects a statistical fluctuation. The independent outlet iStories spoke with workers and looked at economists’ assessments to better understand what’s happening. Meduza shares an abridged translation of their reporting.
“The situation is dire. We haven’t been paid in three months, and nobody can say when the money will come. People can’t make their loan payments — everyone has families,” a foreman in the molding shop at the Kingisepp Machine-Building Plant (KMZ) told iStories. “We have nothing to live on,” confirmed a service engineer who hasn’t received the bonuses that make up most of his income since August. According to workers, the plant is seeing mass layoffs, but even as they leave, people aren’t able to collect their final paychecks.
KMZ is a strategic enterprise that fulfills contracts for the Russian Navy and the National Guard. Its wage arrears may total at least 300 million rubles ($3.7 million), Fontanka reported.
Across Russia (excluding small businesses), wage debt reached 1.95 billion rubles ($24 million) at the end of September — a fourfold increase over the past year, according to Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat).
Who in Russia isn’t getting paid
Rosstat says nearly half of all wage arrears (44.1 percent) are concentrated in the construction sector. For example, workers building the M-12 highway in the Republic of Bashkortostan, a new student campus in Oryol, the Krasnoyarsk metro, and residential buildings in Nizhnevartovsk have all reported delayed pay this year.
Last week, roughly 300 construction workers at a nuclear reactor site in the Ulyanovsk region went on strike over unpaid wages. Some “no longer see any positive prospects, fear the company will go bankrupt, and have already filed resignation letters,” one employee said.
Mining companies account for the second-largest share of wage debt (17.5 percent). In one of the most high-profile cases this year, more than 500 miners were laid off from a coal operation in the Kemerovo region.
In reality, though, examples can be found in almost every sector. Oil workers, hockey players, teachers, and medical staff have all faced wage delays. In the Irkutsk region, a boiler plant worker who hadn’t been paid for months was forced to sell his horse so he could take his child to the hospital.
How serious is the problem?
As of the end of September, 10,300 employees across Russia had experienced delayed wages — an 84.6 percent increase compared to the previous year, according to Rosstat. Total wage debt reached 1.95 billion rubles ($24 million), four times higher than a year earlier. Rostrud, the federal labor watchdog, received 18,400 complaints about unpaid wages in 2024 — up 37.4 percent.
Still, these numbers are modest by historical standards. In 1996, as many as 60 percent of Russians were paid late. Wage arrears peaked in 1998, when average monthly delays totaled about 100 billion rubles ($1.2 billion) — at a time when Russia’s GDP was just 2.6 trillion rubles, or $34 billion (today it exceeds 200 trillion, or $2.5 trillion).
Part of this year’s increase stems from a technical change. In 2025, Rosstat updated the way it records wage delays, which means more companies now report them, wrote Georgy Ostapkovich from Moscow’s Higher School of Economics (HSE).
“This isn’t a trend — just a minor fluctuation linked to the broader economic slowdown. Wage arrears have long been a marginal issue in Russia’s labor market,” said a Russian labor market expert who requested anonymity.
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On the other hand, Rosstat counts only medium and large companies, excluding small businesses. And by its own tally, small firms employ 35 million of Russia’s 74.6 million workers. Rosstat also disregards short delays; for a case to appear in the statistics, a wage must be more than a month overdue. Even so, another Russian economist — also speaking anonymously — said there’s no clear trend toward sustained growth in arrears and attributes the recent surge in the official numbers to a very low base.
According to Rosstat, most wage debts stem from companies’ lack of working capital — often tied to weak demand, delayed payments from customers, rising costs, and other financial pressures. At the Kingisepp Machine-Building Plant, for example, the company is both suing debtors and being sued itself. Fontanka estimates that if KMZ wins all its claims, it could end up hundreds of millions of rubles in the black. Another issue is the sharp drop in state contracts: KMZ received 150 million rubles ($1.8 million) worth in 2023, but less than 60 million ($738,000) in 2025, according to RBC. Still, workers insisted there were no work stoppages before the wage delays and said the plant had plenty of orders, at least “according to rumors.”
A high is another source of wage delays. As Igor Polyakov of the Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting (CMASF) explained, many companies used to cover payroll by taking short-term loans — but these have become prohibitively expensive. Large corporations sometimes divert funds earmarked for wages or supplier payments to service their debts instead, effectively using those obligations as a form of “interest-free borrowing,” said Alexander Safonov, a professor at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation. As a result, their contractors can face not only wage delays but even the risk of bankruptcy. Some companies may even place payroll funds in short-term deposits to earn interest before paying employees.
Another factor, Polyakov added, is the rapid rise in wages themselves. Rosstat reports that in August the average monthly salary in Russia was 92,900 rubles ($1,143), up 12.2 percent year over year in nominal terms. With economic growth slowing, companies that recently hired staff at higher rates are now struggling to pay them.
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