This paper uses a New Economic Geography model to test for wage disparities in the European Union. We derive and estimate an econometric specification relating wages to a distance weighted sum of regional GDP’s. The empirical estimations of the model were carried out for a sample of 160 NUTS2 regions in the EU15 for the year 2000 showing that geography of access to markets is statistically significant and quantitatively important in explaining cross-region variation in European wages. We also show that incentives for human capital accumulation and innovation activities arising from market access size are also affecting the shaping of regional wages in the European Union.