Average Salaries Around the World
Official salary data by country and profession — plus free calculators to work out exactly what you take home after tax.
Finding a reliable average salary by country is harder than it should be. Most sites publish self-reported figures scraped from job boards, where people round up, quote packages instead of base pay, and nobody checks. We do it differently: every figure on this site comes from the national statistics office of the country in question — the ONS in the UK, the BLS in the United States, INE in Spain, INSEE in France, Destatis in Germany. We show the source and the reference year next to every number, and we use the median wherever a country publishes one, because averages get dragged upward by a small number of very high earners and stop describing the typical worker.
Explore Salaries by Country
Median gross salary, converted to USD for comparison. Every figure comes from that country’s national statistics office — full sources and local-currency amounts are in the salary data hub.
🇨🇭 Switzerland$103,800🇺🇸 United States$65,052🇦🇺 Australia$63,500🇩🇪 Germany$61,600🇦🇪 UAE$55,500🇸🇬 Singapore$54,100🇬🇧 United Kingdom$52,300🇮🇪 Ireland$51,200🇳🇱 Netherlands$49,700🇨🇦 Canada$49,400🇸🇪 Sweden$45,200🇳🇿 New Zealand$40,700🇮🇹 Italy$38,300🇫🇷 France$36,800🇪🇸 Spain$26,300🇯🇵 Japan$23,300
Explore Salaries by Profession
Median annual pay in the United States, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ May 2025 survey. Each page breaks the figure down by state, experience and specialism.
Nurse Anesthetist$236,590Physician Assistant$135,880Nurse Practitioner$132,300Radiation Therapist$105,310Dental Hygienist$98,100Registered Nurse$97,550Ultrasound Technician$96,590MRI Technologist$95,480Lineman$95,320Respiratory Therapist$82,280Radiologic Technologist$80,110Surgical Technologist$64,650Plumber$63,800Electrician$63,190HVAC Technician$61,010Welder$53,750
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Gross pay is only half the question, though. What you actually keep depends on the tax system you’re in, and the gap between the two is bigger than most people expect. The calculators below use current official rates — 2026/27 for the UK, tax year 2026 for the US — to turn a headline salary into the figure that reaches your bank account. Australia, Italy and Canada have their own calculators, built into their country pages.
US Take-Home Pay Calculator (2026)
Enter your gross salary to estimate your net pay after federal tax, state tax and FICA.
| Gross salary | $0 |
| Federal income tax | $0 |
| State income tax | $0 |
| Social Security (6.2%) | $0 |
| Medicare (1.45%) | $0 |
| Total deductions | $0 |
| Effective tax rate | 0% |
This is an estimate for informational purposes only and is not tax advice. Federal income tax and FICA use official 2026 IRS and SSA figures. Every state is calculated using its real 2026 rate schedule and its own standard deduction or personal exemption — no flat approximations. State rates and brackets are as of 1 January 2026 (source: Tax Foundation, compiled from state statutes, forms and instructions). A few states index their bracket thresholds annually and had not published 2026 figures at compilation, so those reflect the most recent official schedule. Not included: city and county income taxes, state tax credits, itemised deductions, dependant exemptions, and state disability or paid-leave payroll levies (notably California's 1.1% and Washington's 0.58%). For an exact figure, consult the IRS, your state tax authority or a tax professional.
How to read the two calculators
The two tools above answer the same question in two very different tax systems, and the way each one is built says a lot about where your money goes.
In the United Kingdom, almost everything is national. The first £12,570 you earn is free of income tax — the personal allowance — and the next slice up to £50,270 is taxed at 20%, then 40% above that. National Insurance runs alongside it on a separate set of thresholds: 8% on earnings between £12,570 and £50,270, then 2% on everything above. Two deductions, one rulebook, the same wherever in England, Wales or Northern Ireland you live. That is why the UK calculator asks about your pension contribution and your student loan plan instead of your location: those are the variables that actually move the number. A workplace pension contribution comes out before income tax is applied, so paying 5% into a pension costs you noticeably less than 5% of your take-home. A student loan, by contrast, is deducted after tax at 9% of everything above the repayment threshold for your plan, which is why two people on identical salaries can end up hundreds of pounds a year apart.
In the United States, the federal layer works in a similar stepped way — the standard deduction comes off first, then seven brackets running from 10% up to 37% — but it is only part of the deduction. FICA takes a flat 7.65% for Social Security and Medicare, and on top of that sits state income tax, which is where the real divergence happens. Nine states charge no income tax on wages at all, including Texas, Florida, Washington and Nevada, while California’s top rate reaches 13.3%. That is why the US calculator asks for your state and your filing status: on the same gross salary, moving between two states can change your annual take-home by several thousand dollars without your employer changing a thing. Filing status matters for the same reason — the bracket thresholds for a married couple filing jointly are roughly double those for a single filer, so the same household income is taxed differently depending on how the return is filed.
Both calculators deliberately stop at the deductions almost everyone faces. Neither tries to model health insurance premiums, 401(k) contributions, salary sacrifice arrangements, childcare schemes or the dozens of credits that depend on personal circumstances. The result is a clean baseline you can compare across jobs and across borders — not a substitute for a payslip or for advice from an accountant.
Why gross salary alone is a poor way to compare countries
The country grid at the top of this page ranks sixteen countries by gross pay, and that ranking is genuinely useful — but it answers a narrower question than most people think they are asking. Three things sit between a headline salary and a standard of living.
The first is tax and social contributions, which vary enormously. A country near the top of the gross table can sit several places lower once deductions are taken, while a lower-paying country with a modest tax burden closes part of the gap. The second is what the deductions buy. A US salary has to cover health insurance that a UK or Spanish salary does not, because it is already funded through taxation there. Comparing gross pay between those systems without saying so overstates the American figure. The third is cost of living, and particularly housing, which can swallow the entire advantage of a high-paying city. This is why the figures on this site are converted at market exchange rates and labelled as such, rather than quietly adjusted by a purchasing-power index: the adjustment is a real and useful thing to do, but it is a different measurement, and mixing the two without saying which is which is how misleading salary comparisons get made.
There is also a question of what the statistic itself measures. Most national statistics offices survey employees, not the self-employed, so contractors and freelancers are usually missing from the headline figure entirely. Many publish annual earnings only for people who held the same job for a full year, which quietly removes the group most likely to have had a large pay rise: people who changed employer. Some cover full-time workers only. None of this makes the numbers wrong — they are the most rigorous earnings data each country produces — but it does mean the “average salary” is describing a specific population, and if you are self-employed, part-time or newly hired, it may not be describing you. Each country page on this site spells out which population its figure covers.
Global Salary Data 2026
A single reference page with average and median salary data for 16 countries, 18 US professions and 8 UK skilled trades — every figure taken from a national statistics office, with the source and reference year shown. Free to cite.
Where Our Data Comes From
Every figure comes from a national statistics office or government labour agency — never from job-board averages or self-reported surveys. In practice that means the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings for the UK, the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics programme for the United States, the Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours for Australia, and the equivalent national survey elsewhere. These sources are slower than a job board: they are published once a year and the reference date is usually several months before release, so a figure labelled 2025 describes 2025, not this morning. We think that trade is worth making. A survey built on payroll records that is a year old is a better guide to what a job pays than a real-time number built on what people typed into a form.
Where a country publishes both, we use the median rather than the mean. The median is the salary of the person in the middle — half earn more, half earn less — while the mean is pulled upward by a small number of very high earners and stops describing the typical worker. The gap is not small: in the UK the mean full-time salary sits several thousand pounds above the median. When only a mean is available, we label it as such. We also show the reference year next to every number and update each page when the underlying survey is republished, which is why a figure here sometimes differs from one quoted elsewhere — it is usually a different year, a different population, or a mean quoted as if it were a median. See our full methodology.