Questions about Australian pay, answered

Start with what an occupation actually earned rather than what a recruiter says it should. The Australian Taxation Office publishes median salary and wage income for roughly 1,600 occupations, drawn from lodged tax returns, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics publishes full-time earnings for the broader occupation groups those sit inside.

Search your job title and you get the ATO median for that occupation, a state comparison where one can be published, and a full-time benchmark from ABS data where one exists. It is a starting position for a pay conversation that is grounded in published government data, not a survey of who chose to answer.

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Open Australian government data, and nothing scraped from job ads. Occupation medians and state comparisons come from ATO Taxation Statistics 2023-24. The ratios behind the estimated pay guide come from the ABS Employee Earnings and Hours survey of May 2025. Jobs and Skills Australia and the ABS occupation index supply extra title wording and classification mappings.

All of it is published under Creative Commons Attribution licences, which is both why we can use it and why we can show you exactly where each figure came from.

The full working, including the known limitations, is on the methodology page.

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Because that is how long the ATO takes. Taxation Statistics for an income year are published roughly two years after that year closes, since every return has to be lodged and assessed first. There is no fresher source with the same coverage or the same honesty about its own method.

Pay may have moved since, so eligible results offer a year selector that projects the median forward using the occupation group’s own recent change in average salary income rather than a blanket inflation figure. It is off by default, labelled as an estimate wherever it appears, and never compounded for more than four years.

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No, and the gap between the two is the single thing people most often misread.

An advertised salary describes one full-time job. A tax-return median describes everyone who worked in that occupation, including people who worked part of the year, worked part-time or changed jobs mid-year. That pulls the median below what the same role would be advertised at.

Where the ABS publishes one, the result also shows a full-time benchmark beside the tax-return median: median weekly earnings for full-time, non-managerial adult-rate workers in the broader occupation group, annualised. Useful context, but not a like-for-like correction.

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The median is the occupation’s own published figure, adjusted by its broader occupation group if you pick a state. The lower and upper markers around it apply reference ratios from ABS earnings data for the broad occupational group, because that is the only level at which the ABS publishes a full distribution.

That means those markers are not observed percentiles for your specific occupation. A software engineer and a primary school teacher are both classified as professionals, so they get the same shaped guide around different medians. Read it directionally, not as a count of how many people earned each amount.

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The ATO publishes state figures by occupation group rather than by specific occupation, and it suppresses cells that are too small to release. We fall back to the Australia-wide figure when a state cell was suppressed, when fewer than 100 people reported that group in that state, or when the published ratio falls outside a 0.5x to 2x sanity guardrail.

The result tells you when that fallback was used. We would rather show you a national number and say so than invent a state one.

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Averages are the wrong tool for this question. Australian income is heavily skewed by a small number of very high earners, so the average sits well above what a typical person earns and comparing yourself to it tells you very little.

A percentile answers it properly: it tells you what share of Australian taxpayers earned less than you did, using the ATO’s published income distribution. Enter an income and you get your position among all taxpayers, plus a plain-language view of where the whole country sits.

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Start with your gross income for the financial year, then subtract three things: income tax on that income after the Low Income Tax Offset, the Medicare levy of 2%, and any compulsory study or training loan repayment. What is left is your take-home pay.

The first $18,200 you earn is tax-free, and each band above it is taxed only on the part of your income that falls inside it — so moving into a higher bracket never reduces your take-home pay. Our calculator shows the result annually, monthly, fortnightly and weekly, with the tax, levy and loan repayment itemised so you can see where each dollar went.

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Usually not. In Australia super is normally paid on top of your salary rather than out of it — the employer super guarantee has been 12% since 1 July 2025 — so a "$90,000 + super" role and a "$90,000 package including super" role are meaningfully different offers.

That is why job ads are worth reading twice, and why our calculator lets you enter income either way. It shows the employer contribution and your total package alongside your take-home figure, so you can compare two offers on the same basis.

It also applies the maximum super contribution base, the quarterly earnings ceiling above which an employer is not required to contribute — which is why super stops rising at high incomes.

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Yes. You can add salary sacrifice into super, work-related deductions and reportable fringe benefits, and set a study or training loan, private health cover, a spouse and dependants, senior and pensioner status, a Medicare levy exemption, and part-year residency.

Those inputs are not decoration: the Medicare levy surcharge depends on your family situation as well as your income, salary sacrifice changes your taxable income and your loan repayment at the same time, and a part-year resident is taxed on a different bracket table entirely. Leave them alone and you get the standard resident case.

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Treat it as a guide, not a payslip. It applies the ATO’s published rates and thresholds for the financial year you select, so the arithmetic is right, but your actual pay can differ through other income, your specific study-loan balance, payroll rounding, and how your employer applies PAYG withholding across the year.

It is also an annual view. If your income changed mid-year, or you started work partway through it, your withholding through the year and your final assessment will not match each other — and neither will match a flat annual estimate.

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It depends on three things: your balance, your income, and the indexation rate over the years it takes. Compulsory repayments are worked out from your income against the ATO’s repayment thresholds, so a pay rise shortens the road considerably and a period of low income lengthens it.

Our calculator projects your balance one financial year at a time in the order things really happen — voluntary repayments first, indexation on 1 June, then the compulsory repayment when your return is assessed — and shows the year you clear it, with a chart of the balance along the way.

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Study and training loans are indexed once a year, on 1 June, at the lower of inflation (CPI) and wage growth (WPI). They do not attract interest — indexation is the only thing that grows the balance.

Nobody can tell you next year’s rate. It has swung from 0.6% in 2021 to 7.1% in 2023, and that 2023 figure was later cut retrospectively to 3.2% when the lower-of rule was introduced. Our calculator defaults to 3%, but the honest advice is to try a few rates and see how much your payoff year actually moves.

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Timing changes the answer more than the amount does. The money withheld from your pay through the year is not credited to your loan until your tax return is assessed, which happens after 30 June — so it does not reduce the balance that gets indexed on 1 June. A voluntary repayment made before 1 June does.

In other words, paying extra in May beats paying the same amount in July. Whether paying at all beats putting the money elsewhere depends on the indexation rate versus what else you would do with it — model both and decide with numbers rather than vibes.

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More than your salary. The ATO uses repayment income, which adds reportable fringe benefits, reportable super contributions such as salary sacrifice, exempt foreign employment income and net investment losses back on top of your taxable income.

This catches people out: salary sacrificing into super lowers your taxable income but not your repayment income, so it will not reduce your compulsory repayment. If any of these apply to you, expect your real repayments to be somewhat higher than a salary-only estimate.

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No. There is no time limit. The debt remains until it is repaid, or cancelled on death — and an estate is only liable for the compulsory amount relating to income earned before death.

That is worth knowing in both directions. A low income is not on its own a reason to panic about a growing balance, because nothing is compounding as interest. But the balance does not quietly go away either, so it is worth knowing how long the road is.

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Not because the employer does not have a number. Job boards generally ask for a minimum and a maximum when a role is posted, because that is what powers the salary filter candidates search with — but displaying it publicly is usually optional.

So an ad with no salary is rarely an ad with no range. It is an ad where the range exists in the platform and was not shown to you, and that asymmetry is the whole reason salary negotiations start with the employer holding better information than you do.

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Paste the listing URL into our Job Ad Analyser. It reads any salary the employer chose to publish, and where none is shown it narrows down the range the listing sits in by testing the ad against the job board’s own salary filters.

Every result carries a confidence level so you know which of those you got, and you can send the figure straight through to the Pay Calculator to see what it means after tax.

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They tell you how the number was obtained, which matters more than the number itself.

High means the salary is explicitly advertised on the listing. Medium means the range was determined from the platform rather than the ad text. Low means it is an approximation based on indicators. Unknown means we could not determine it — and we say so rather than guessing.

Treat anything below High as an indication, not an offer. A final salary still moves with experience, qualifications, location, conditions, super and negotiation.

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A listing that is not attached to a real, active vacancy — a role already filled but still advertised, a pipeline ad kept permanently open, or a posting used mainly to gather résumés for a candidate database.

There is no label on them, so the analyser reports signals instead: how long the ad has been running, whether it has been reposted, how the employer account looks, and how the application is routed. None of these is conclusive on its own. Together they tell you whether to spend an hour tailoring an application, or ten minutes.

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Most SEEK listings publish an applicant count, and the analyser surfaces it when it is there. It is a genuinely useful number: it tells you whether you are one of five candidates or one of five hundred, which is a different application in each case.

When it is blank, that is usually the listing rather than a failure to look. Ads that link out to an employer’s own careers site never carry a count, and a brand-new ad has not accrued one yet. We show the count where it exists and stay quiet where it does not.

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Some are. Employers, recruiters and job platforms maintain candidate databases for future opportunities, which is not improper in itself — but the advertised position may not represent an immediate vacancy.

Before applying, check who is collecting your information, where the application link actually leads, and what the privacy collection notice says about how your details will be used. Be especially careful with identity documents: a genuine employer does not need them before an interview.

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An Applicant Tracking System is the software most employers use to receive and manage applications. When you apply, it parses your résumé into a candidate profile — name, contact details, work history, skills — and recruiters then search and filter those profiles.

If the parser cannot read your file properly, those fields arrive blank or scrambled and your application can be filtered out before a person ever sees it. An ATS-friendly résumé is not a special kind of résumé. It is simply one a parser can read reliably.

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Because visual polish and machine readability are different problems, and the design choices that impress a human are often the ones that break a parser. Multi-column layouts get read across instead of down. Tables, text boxes and headers scramble or vanish. Contact details inside a graphic are invisible.

Our checker shows you a "what an ATS sees" preview of your own file. If a field is missing there, that is what the employer’s system receives. The fix is usually dull and effective: a single-column layout, conventional section headings, and every role listed with employer, title and a start-to-end date range.

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Yes, and more literally than most people expect. Keyword filters match wording, not meaning: "React" does not register as "front-end frameworks", and "GP" does not register as "general practitioner".

Paste the job ad into the checker and it extracts the ad’s most important terms, weighting the requirements section more heavily, then reports which ones appear in your résumé. Use the ad’s own terminology wherever it is genuinely true of you. Stuffing in skills you do not have simply moves the failure to the interview.

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No to both. Your file is analysed in memory and discarded as soon as your report is generated. It is never written to disk, never stored, never shared, and no AI model reads it — every check is a fixed, transparent rule, which is also why the same file always produces the same result.

We keep anonymous usage statistics such as file type and score, and never your résumé, your name or your contact details.

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Every tool on the site is free, and none of them requires an account, an email address or a sign-up. You can use the whole site without telling us who you are.

If you want to hear when something new ships, there is a mailing list in the footer, and contact page if you would rather just ask us something.

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No. Everything here is general information produced from published data and stated assumptions. It does not take your circumstances into account, and it is not financial, taxation, legal or career advice.

Use it to walk into a conversation better informed — a pay review, an offer, a decision about a study loan — and get advice from a registered professional before acting on anything that matters. The methodology page sets out exactly what each figure is and what it is not.

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We keep anonymous usage information so we can tell whether a tool is working: which tool ran, whether it succeeded, how long it took, and an anonymised visitor identifier used for rate limiting. Your IP address is not stored in a form that identifies you.

We do not build a profile of you, and we do not sell anything to anyone. The full detail, including what our analytics provider receives, is in the privacy policy.

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Please tell us — it is genuinely useful. Send the tool, what you entered and what you expected through the contact page and we will look at it.

If it is a question of method rather than a bug, the methodology page documents how each figure is derived, including the cases where we knowingly show an approximation and say so.

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