Why equal is far from fair when it comes to speeding tickets

How much does a speeding ticket actually hurt? That depends largely on your paycheck. What’s a minor annoyance for a high-flyer can be a financial catastrophe for someone living paycheck to paycheck. Does a €145 fine really carry the same weight for a CEO as it does for a part-time cleaner?

Currently, a speeding offence of 15 to 25 km/h in urban areas always costs 145 euros for everyone – anything over that will end up in court. For a person on the unqualified minimum wage, this means that they have to pay 5.5 per cent of their monthly income as a fine. By way of comparison, if a person with the average Luxembourg salary (according to Statec, this will be around €82,969 gross in November 2025) were treated equally based in income-percentage, they would have to pay a fine of around €380. That should be enough to make most people think twice about just how fast they need to go.

In practice, the average earner pays 2.1 per cent of their monthly salary for a standard speeding ticket – less than half compared to the unqualified minimum wage. For people earning 100,000 euros gross per year, this currently corresponds to about 1.7 per cent of their monthly salary. If they were to pay proportionally the same as the poorest – 5.5 per cent – they would have to fork out about 458 euros. In short: the more you earn, the less it hurts. However, if you are willing and able to bear the small financial blows, you often have to go a long way to be cited in court.