Average salary, median salary, and which one you are behind

If you have ever read your country's average salary and concluded that you are doing badly, there is a decent chance the statistic is at fault rather than your career. Salary distributions are not symmetric, and the average is systematically higher than what a typical person earns.

Why the average sits above the middle

Pay has a floor and no ceiling. Nobody earns less than zero, and a small number of people earn many multiples of the typical wage. That produces a long right tail, and a long right tail pulls the mean upward while leaving the median where it is.

The effect is easy to see with a tiny example. Nine people earning 2,000 and one earning 20,000:

Nine of the ten people earn below average. That is not a rhetorical trick; it is the normal condition of a skewed distribution. In real national data the median typically lands somewhere around 80 to 90 percent of the mean, and the gap is widest where top-end pay is most concentrated.

What our figures actually are

This is the part most sites do not tell you, so: the average salary figures on this site come from national statistics offices, Eurostat and labour ministries, and they are not all the same statistic. Some countries publish a mean gross monthly wage. Some publish a median. Some publish full-time equivalent earnings, which excludes part-time workers and therefore reads higher. Some cover the whole economy and some exclude the public sector or small firms.

We take the headline figure each national source publishes, because that is the number that is actually authoritative for that country, and the alternative would be inventing a harmonised series we are not in a position to produce. The consequence is that cross-country comparison of averages is indicative rather than exact, and we would rather say that than imply a precision the underlying data does not have. The same caveat is on the methodology page.

Four questions to ask of any salary statistic

• Mean or median? If unstated, assume mean, and assume the typical earner is below it.
• Gross or net? Most published wage statistics are gross. Comparing your net pay to a gross average is the most common version of this mistake and can misdirect you by thirty percent or more.
• Full-time only, or everyone? Including part-time workers drags the figure down substantially in economies with high part-time employment, the Netherlands being the standard example.
• Which year? Wage data is published with a lag, often twelve to eighteen months. In a period of high inflation an eighteen-month-old average is describing a different economy.

Better questions than "am I above average"

The national average is a weak benchmark for an individual because it blends every occupation, region and experience level into one number. Two comparisons carry much more information:

• Your salary against the local floor. The ratio of your pay to the minimum wage is a clean signal, and it travels across borders better than absolute amounts do. That is discussed in why minimum wage comparisons mislead.
• Your salary against your own occupation and city. National statistics offices publish breakdowns by occupation and region, and those are the numbers a recruiter is actually working from.

And if you are comparing an offer abroad, the average salary is a poor proxy for whether the money goes further. Net pay after local tax, local prices and local housing costs decide that, which is the subject of the moving abroad checklist. Each country's average salary page shows the figure both gross and net, which at least removes the first of the four errors above.