Data story · Monthly earnings
What a month of work pays, around the world
These are PPP dollars — adjusted for what money buys locally — so the spread is a real consumption gap, not an exchange-rate artifact. The average employee in Luxembourg earns $9,275 PPP/mo, about 48× the $193 PPP/mo in Rwanda. The median of all 92 countries is $1,928 PPP/mo, and in 21 of them a month of average work buys less than $1,000 of goods. The OECD's wage series covers 38 mostly rich countries; this ILO series is what the same question looks like when the other half of the world is allowed to answer.
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Fiatmap, “What a month of work pays, around the world”, fiatmap.com/stories/what-a-month-of-work-pays. Licensed CC BY 4.0. Underlying data: official statistics, each value dated at source.
| # | Country | Monthly earnings |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Luxembourg | $9,275 PPP/mo |
| 2 | Belgium | $8,077 PPP/mo |
| 3 | Netherlands | $7,383 PPP/mo |
| 4 | Austria | $7,259 PPP/mo |
| 5 | Norway | $6,694 PPP/mo |
| 6 | Denmark | $6,689 PPP/mo |
| 7 | Finland | $6,356 PPP/mo |
| 8 | United States | $6,273 PPP/mo |
| 9 | Germany | $6,135 PPP/mo |
| 10 | Switzerland | $6,070 PPP/mo |
| ⋮ and at the other end | ||
| 90 | Ethiopia | $312 PPP/mo |
| 91 | Nigeria | $288 PPP/mo |
| 92 | Rwanda | $193 PPP/mo |
How to read this figure
Mean monthly earnings of employees from the ILO, in PPP international dollars — gross, before tax, main job, full-time and part-time workers together, both sexes. This is the wage field that reaches beyond the OECD: 91 countries against the average wage’s 38. It is not the same figure as the OECD average salary and should not be multiplied by twelve to compare with it — different collection, different population, and the ILO series is a mean of whatever employment the national source covers.
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