Tax wedge
What does employing someone really cost, tax included?
Tax wedge for a single average earner (type case, not advice).
Chile leads with 7.46 %; Belgium sits last at 52.48 %. Best-for-you first — lower is better here.
Coverage: 36 of ~38 countries this field can reach — OECD members only — the definition exists nowhere else
Free to republish — just credit us
Fiatmap, “Tax wedge by country”, fiatmap.com/rankings/tax. Licensed CC BY 4.0. Underlying data: official statistics (BIS, ECB, FRED, Eurostat, OECD, World Bank, SSB), each value dated at source.
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Top-10 table (live)
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World map
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On the map
The full ranking
| 1 | Chile | 7.46 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 2 | New Zealand | 20.81 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 3 | Mexico | 21.65 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 4 | Switzerland | 22.98 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 5 | South Korea | 24.85 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 6 | Israel | 26.07 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 7 | Costa Rica | 27.66 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 8 | Australia | 27.90 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 9 | United States | 29.98 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 10 | Canada | 32.12 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 11 | United Kingdom | 32.38 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 12 | Ireland | 32.63 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 13 | Japan | 33.12 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 14 | Poland | 35.03 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 15 | Denmark | 35.76 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 16 | Netherlands | 35.94 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 17 | Norway | 36.39 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 18 | Greece | 39.34 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 19 | Portugal | 39.34 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 20 | Lithuania | 39.79 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 21 | Latvia | 40.14 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 22 | Luxembourg | 40.16 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 23 | Turkey | 40.33 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 24 | Sweden | 41.14 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 25 | Hungary | 41.15 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 26 | Czech Republic | 41.20 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 27 | Spain | 41.44 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 28 | Finland | 42.48 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 29 | Estonia | 42.64 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 30 | Slovakia | 42.72 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 31 | Slovenia | 45.30 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 32 | Italy | 45.76 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 33 | Austria | 47.09 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 34 | France | 47.18 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 35 | Germany | 49.26 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
| 36 | Belgium | 52.48 % | 2025 | Checked 8 Sept 2026 |
Regional averages
Europe (25)
40.39 %
Americas (5)
23.77 %
Asia (4)
31.09 %
Unweighted mean of the published values in each region — our aggregation, not an official statistic.
How to read this figure
The OECD tax wedge: income tax plus employee AND employer social contributions as a share of total labour cost, for a single person at exactly the average wage. It is a comparable type case between countries — not your personal tax rate.
Countries with the lowest tax wedge · Countries with the highest tax wedge
How to read this list
Tax wedge for a single average earner (type case, not advice). 36 countries publish it; the rest are absent from the list rather than shown as zero. All figures were observed in 2025, so the list is a genuine snapshot. Each row still carries its date in the CSV and JSON. Nothing here is estimated or carried forward to fill a gap. This metric is one column of the full dataset.