The Ministry of Information and Telecommunications has rejected a proposal by the management boards of Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) and Radio Television of Vojvodina (RTV) to align the public service media fee with inflation. According to trade unions, this decision could further jeopardize RTV’s financial stability and the material position of its employees.
“The Ministry of Information and Telecommunications does not agree with your proposal, given that the alignment of the fee amount is provided by law as a possibility. We therefore believe that, at this moment, it is not necessary to align the public service media fee with the inflation rate in the Republic of Serbia, i.e. to increase the fee to 387.32 dinars,” the Ministry stated in its response to the proposal recently submitted by the management boards of RTS and RTV, which NUNS had access to.
As the Ministry further explained, the Law on Public Media Services stipulates: “The amount of the fee may be aligned once a year, based on the inflation growth rate in the Republic of Serbia, according to officially published data of the authority competent for statistics, provided that it may not be lower than 0.6% of the minimum wage in the Republic of Serbia established for that year.”
Thus, the key word in Article 37, paragraph 2 of the Law is “may,” and in accordance with this provision, a decision was made not to approve an increase in the fee from the current 349 dinars to 387.32 dinars.
On the other hand, trade unions warn that the decision will have serious consequences for RTV’s functioning and for employees’ livelihoods.
Darko Šper of the RTV branch of the Nezavisnost Trade Union told NUNS that both management boards adopted the decision back in November 2025, in line with the new Law on Public Media Services, and informed the Ministry, which responded very quickly.
According to Šper, in the case of RTV alone, the fee increase would have meant a significant rise in revenues. “For RTV, this would amount to a monthly increase in fee revenues of just over twenty million dinars. Even without that money, we have now reached a situation where we do not have the funds to increase salaries, as is the case across Serbia – by five percent,” Šper said.
He warned that the situation among employees is already alarming. “At RTV, nearly 500 out of 1,200 employees received the minimum wage with their last paycheck. The minimum wage is already being paid to some positions that require a university degree. It has come to the point where employees with the lowest level of education are earning the same as those with highest level qualifications,” Šper stressed.
He added that approving the fee increase would at least partially improve the situation. “The unions at RTV are already negotiating with the employer to raise employees’ incomes, and if those funds were approved, only a small number of people would be on the minimum wage, but we simply do not have the money for that,” he emphasized.
Šper also recalled that the minimum wage has been increased several times in recent years, while public broadcasters’ revenues have not kept pace – there have been no increases either in the licence fee or in budget allocations intended for public media services.
According to him, keeping the fee at its current level could also have broader consequences for programme production. “If the licence fee remains at 349 dinars, RTV may reach a point where it cannot purchase anything from independent producers, because there is no funding source. And after the next increase in the minimum wage, we could see a much higher percentage of employees earning only the minimum,” Šper warned.
