At some point or another, you’ve probably googled “average salaries Australia” and been hit with more numbers and terms than you knew what to do with.

Median salary, average salary, unemployed, underemployed, compensation, remuneration?!!?!?

You thought you’d check out how your income compares to your peers, and instead you wound up more confused than when you first came across algebra.

Breaking down big chunks of data like national salaries can be a slog, but it can also give you a lot of useful information to help you plan for your financial future.

Are you being paid fairly for your experience-level? What salary range can you aim for in the next two years? In the next ten?

To start to answer these questions, we need to look at income data in Australia.

Only, instead of throwing dozens of numbers your way, we’ll break down exactly what the data means. There’s a pun in there for the math nerds.

The average salary

According to the ABS, the average salary of a full-time Australian worker is $1,888.80 per week (or $98,217.60 annually) pre-tax.

Sounds like a lot hey? While this figure is reflective of the Australian population, it’s also a little misleading because the average is calculated by summing up all the salaries in the dataset. 

So it can be skewed upwards thanks to the 1%-ers who earn massive salaries. 

Think major CEOs of listed companies who get paid multi-million dollar salaries.

Fun fact: the CEO of Macquarie, Shemara Wikramanayake earns the highest salary in Australia, or over $30 million!

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A more useful figure is the median. The median salary of a full-time employee in Australia is $1,600 per week ($67,600 annually) pre-tax.

Average vs. median - let’s look at an example

As an example of why average income data skews, if there are ten people in a room, nine of them earn $30,000 and one earns $300,000, the average salary would be $57,000. 

That one person earning $300,000 has pushed up the average figure, and it's not really an accurate reflection of the “average” person's income.

Whereas, the median measures the salary point at which 50% of the population is below, and 50% of the population is above, so ity gives a more realistic picture of what the everyday Aussie is earning.

Let’s break median salary down further

Now that we have the national median salary (which we know is more useful than the average), we can sprinkle in some variables to get an even better comparison to our own salary.

Quick note: the tables below are using median salaries of full-time employees’, that means part-time and casual worker incomes are excluded in the calculation too. 

The salaries in the tables are also all pre-tax figures.

‍Median salaries by state

This is just where it begins. You can go even deeper if you’re keen to go Sherlock Holmes on your income data.

For starters, you can look at what the average and median pay is for different occupations, and industries.

The ABS website has plenty of ways in which it breaks down income data which you can check out.

Fair warning, it can become a bit of an addictive rabbit hole so enter at your own risk!