Methodology

A ghost job is an advertisement that may not represent an active, immediately available role. It is different from a job scam: the listing may be associated with a genuine employer, but there may be no current intention to make a hire.

We do not apply a national percentage to ghost jobs. There is not yet a peer-reviewed, Australia-specific study that provides a reliable national estimate of their prevalence.

Some ads warrant closer attention when they appear to remain open for an unusually long time, offer little concrete detail about the work, or use wording that appears to invite applications for future rather than current opportunities. No one sign proves that an ad is a ghost job: legitimate roles can take time to fill, be reposted, or be advertised for ongoing recruitment.

This caution is supported by peer-reviewed Australian research: a Queensland study found that vacancy duration can vary with the role's skill level, regional accessibility, and the size of the advertising firm. We therefore treat an ad's age as one consideration among several, rather than evidence on its own. Read the study.

The Ghost Checker combines a range of listing signals in a probabilistic model. It applies thresholds to estimate the likelihood that a specific advertisement may not be tied to active hiring, and presents the result as a likelihood rather than a fact. We intentionally do not publish the precise signals, weights, or thresholds, so the tool can remain useful as job-ad behaviour changes.

The result is a prompt to investigate further-not a verdict on an employer. If a listing is flagged, consider checking the employer's careers page, looking for a clear closing date, or contacting the employer before investing significant time in an application.

The Pay Calculator starts with the gross income you enter and annualises it using the selected pay frequency. It then uses the tax settings for the financial year you select to estimate your annual take-home pay.

The estimate applies marginal income-tax brackets and the Low Income Tax Offset where relevant. For Australian residents, it also estimates the Medicare levy and Medicare levy surcharge using the exact M2 non-liability days entered, plus compulsory study or training loan repayments when selected. A full-year spouse scenario is supported when both the spouse's taxable income and MLS-purpose income are entered. If either spouse is SAPTO-eligible, the spouse's ATO rebate income is also required so the calculator can test actual entitlement rather than eligibility alone. Cases where both spouses are SAPTO-eligible remain blocked because unused offsets may transfer between them.

A spouse or dependant status change during the financial year, sole-parent scenarios and shared-care arrangements are blocked rather than estimated, because they require additional day-level allocation.

Superannuation is shown separately from take home pay. If your salary excludes super, we estimate the employer super guarantee on top of your cash salary. If it includes super, we derive an estimated cash salary from the package amount before calculating deductions. The calculator then shows annual, monthly, fortnightly, and weekly figures; these are annual estimates divided by 12, 26, and 52 respectively.

Results are rounded to cents and are intended as a guide. Actual payroll and tax outcomes can differ because of salary sacrifice, deductions, other income, family circumstances, the exact timing of pay, private-health details, loan balances, and payroll withholding or rounding. The calculator is not tax or financial advice.

Australian Salary Search combines openly licensed Australian government datasets to show an occupation median, a modelled pay guide and supporting benchmarks. No job ads are scraped. Published statistics and derived figures are identified separately.

The median for each occupation is the ATO's median non-zero salary or wage income for the 2023-24 income year, from Taxation Statistics, Individuals Table 15. The table also publishes how many people reported each occupation, which is shown for context; it does not publish the exact non-zero-income population used to calculate the median. Choosing a state scales the national occupation median by how the broader occupation group's state median compares with its national median. Where the ATO suppressed a state cell, fewer than 100 people reported the group there, or the published state-to-national ratio falls outside a 0.5x to 2x sanity guardrail, the national figure is shown instead and the result says so. An excluded number is never interpolated.

The guide around the median applies four reference ratios from the earnings distribution of the broad occupational group the job belongs to, using the ABS Employee Earnings and Hours survey (May 2025). One-digit ANZSCO is the only level at which the ABS publishes a full distribution, so every occupation within a major group borrows the same shape. The resulting lower, middle and upper guide markers are not observed percentiles for the narrower occupation. This is the weakest step in the chain and should be read directionally.

Two properties of the source population matter when reading the result. ATO figures describe a population that includes part-year and part-time workers, so the median sits below what an equivalent full-time role would be advertised at - this is not an advertised-salary benchmark. And the ABS spread is drawn from full-time non-managerial employees paid at the adult rate, a narrower population than the ATO median, which is why the lower end of the range is the least certain part of it.

Rather than model that difference away, both figures are shown. For the roughly 300 occupation groups where the ABS publishes it, the result carries a full-time benchmark: median weekly earnings for full-time non-managerial employees paid at the adult rate, from the same May 2025 survey, annualised at 52 weeks, alongside the share of the occupation that works part-time. The gap makes the population difference visible, but it cannot be attributed to part-time work alone: occupation granularity, part-year work, managerial scope, adult-rate coverage and reference period also differ. This figure is published at occupation-group level only and never for a specific 6-digit occupation.

The ATO publishes roughly two years in arrears, so figures are 2023-24 money by default. Each result may offer an optional adjustment into the later income year shown. It is the estimator's forward-looking projection, not a published statistic or a blanket inflation uplift. ATO Taxation Statistics Table 14B carries average salary income for every occupation group in every income year from 2010-11 onward, so eligible occupations are aged forward at their compound annual change over the last 5 years of that series. Rates outside 0% to 8% are not extrapolated, and no rate is applied for more than four years. The adjustment is off unless requested, the rate is displayed, and every adjusted figure is labelled an estimate. An average moves with hours worked and the mix of people in an occupation, not only with pay rates.

The same series drives the trend chart shown under each result, and is published for occupation groups only - never for a specific occupation. A group is charted only where it has at least six consecutive recent years with 500 or more people reporting the occupation group; below that the ATO's residual categories can produce movements that describe reclassification rather than pay.

Public data carries no seniority dimension, so a job title is as fine-grained as the estimate can be. Matching a typed title to one of about 1,600 official occupation labels is a heuristic; every result names the occupation it matched and offers the runners-up. The index draws on the ATO's own labels, the formal ANZSCO wording published by Jobs and Skills Australia, the official alternative titles and specialisations in the ABS OSCA index, and a hand-maintained list of colloquialisms. Displayed estimates and guide markers are rounded to the nearest $100, because a derived number shown to the dollar claims a precision it does not have.

The occupation codes here belong to ANZSCO 1220.0 (2022), which is being retired in favour of OSCA 2024 v1.0. The correspondence between the two is generated from the ABS tables and shipped with the tool, and each result can show where its occupation lands. Where the ABS flags a correspondence as partial - the two codes overlap without describing the same job - nothing is carried across it, because a partial match is not an equivalence.