Median Salaries by Country 2026: Gross, Net, and PPP-Adjusted

When comparing salaries across countries, the gross figure is almost irrelevant. What matters is how much you keep after tax and how far that money goes. A $66,390 salary in Denmark sounds impressive until you discover 60 % of it reaches your account — and Copenhagen is one of Europe’s most expensive cities. A $56,540 salary in Singapore, meanwhile, leaves 96 % yours — most as cash, part as mandatory CPF retirement savings that stay in your name — in one of the highest-quality cities in the world.

This page publishes WhereNext’s open dataset of median annual salaries for 43 countries, covering gross, net (domestic resident tax), PPP-adjusted net, and months of local costs covered by one year’s net pay. All figures use Q1 2026 FX and World Bank ICP 2021 PPP. The underlying data is CC BY 4.0 — you can download the full dataset as JSON or CSV.

Caveat before you read: these are national population medians. A tech worker in Zurich earns three times the Swiss national median. A rural subsistence farmer in Vietnam earns less. The numbers here answer the question “what does a typical employed person in this country take home?” — not “what could I earn there?” For profession-specific estimates, use the Salary Calculator.

What Is the Median Net Salary by Country?

The Efficiency Question: Who Keeps the Most?

Gross salary is a vanity metric. What matters is the effective take-home rate — what share of gross the median worker retains after income tax. Mandatory retirement savings that stay in your name (like Singapore’s CPF) count as retained here, since that balance is yours; pure taxes and social charges you never see again do not. The variation across our 43-country dataset is striking:

• United Arab Emirates: 100% — the dataset’s highest retention, an artifact of levying no personal income tax on salaries at all. Treat it as a category of its own rather than a policy benchmark.
• Singapore: 96% — CPF contributions (typically 20% employee) are deferred savings, not a tax, so our model excludes them from the tax bite. The pure income-tax cost at the median is small, and the CPF balance is yours on retirement.
• Switzerland: 80% — high gross ($96,234) and high retention combine. Note that Swiss cantons vary significantly; Zug residents keep more, Zurich residents keep less than the national median.
• Australia: 78% — $64,650 gross becomes $50,731 net. Low social contributions and a tax-free threshold explain the edge over most of Europe.
• Belgium: 62% — among the lower retention rates in the dataset. Belgium’s combination of high marginal rates, social security contributions, and municipal taxes means the median worker keeps well over half of their gross. France (72%) is similarly low, while Germany (57%) is the dataset’s lowest-retention example.
• Denmark: 60% — often cited as a high-tax country, but the median worker receives substantial healthcare, childcare, and education benefits funded by those taxes — a trade-off not captured by the retention percentage alone.

PPP-Adjusted Net: Where Does Salary Actually Go Furthest?

Purchasing power parity (PPP) adjusts for the local price level, answering the question: “how much US buying power does this salary represent?” The full take-home, tax-adjusted local purchasing power ranking by country lives on our open-data page — statistical-office medians, netted with our per-country tax model, in international dollars. The rankings shift meaningfully when you apply PPP:

• Singapore: $73,157 PPP net — leads the dataset outright. A 96% keep rate meets an exceptionally favourable PPP conversion factor: prices sit well below what the nominal exchange rate implies.
• Switzerland: $58,133 PPP net — the nominal-salary champion lands second in real terms. Geneva groceries and Zurich rents claw back part of the world’s highest median pay.
• United States: $50,020 PPP net — the PPP base country: its net salary IS its purchasing power by definition, which makes it the cleanest yardstick in the list.
• Iceland: $46,928 PPP net — a strong balance of pay, taxes, and prices rounds out the top four.

Months of Local Costs: The Relocation Relevance Score

For relocation decisions, the most actionable metric is how many months of local living costs the median net salary covers in one year. A value above 12 means the median worker has surplus — below 12 means the median salary does not cover a year of median lifestyle:

• Singapore: 24.2 months — the dataset’s leader: a 96% keep rate on a strong median makes Singapore the standout place to earn and save.
• Switzerland: 19.4 months — despite high prices, Swiss salaries are high enough that the median worker saves substantially.
• United States: 16.7 months — US cost of living varies enormously by state, but the national median earner generates meaningful surplus.
• Belgium: 12 months — the median Belgian worker’s net pay covers well under a year of Belgian living costs. This explains why Belgium has one of Europe’s higher rates of dual-income households.
• Vietnam: 2.8 months — the lowest in the dataset. The median Vietnamese salary of $2,546/year in a country where even modest living costs run several hundred dollars a month illustrates the gap between expat and local economic realities.

What This Means for Relocation Decisions

These medians are population-level statistics; your situation as a relocating professional will differ in four important ways:

1. Your profession pays above or below the median. A software engineer in Portugal earns 40–70 % above the national median. A teacher in Switzerland earns close to it. Use the Salary Calculator with your specific profession for a more accurate comparison.
2. Local resident tax ≠ expat tax. Most countries have special regimes for incoming professionals: Portugal’s IFICI, Spain’s Beckham Law, the Netherlands’ 30% ruling, Italy’s Impatriati. The net figures here use domestic resident tax; your effective rate may be significantly lower. See the Expat Tax Rates dataset.
3. Data vintage matters. These figures span 2022–2024. Countries with high nominal inflation (Turkey, Brazil) may show materially different numbers today. Each row includes a dataYear field — check it before citing.
4. The national median masks cities. Milan and Turin salaries run ~40 % above the Italian national median. Lisbon runs ~25 % above Portugal’s median. If you are relocating to a major economic hub, skew upward from the national figure.

Methodology

Gross median figures are sourced from OECD Average Annual Wages (AV_AN_WAGE dataset, latest 2024), Eurostat Structure of Earnings Survey 2022 (for EU percentiles), ILO Global Wage Report 2024–25 (for non-OECD coverage), and national statistics offices for Singapore (DOS), UAE (FCSC), Brazil (IBGE), Mexico (INEGI), Thailand (NSO), Vietnam (GSO), and South Africa (StatsSA). Net figures are derived using WhereNext’s domestic tax model ( the same model behind the expat tax rates page), applied at the median gross level. PPP conversion uses World Bank ICP 2021 AIC PLI. FX rates are Q1 2026 spot mid-rates.

Percentile data (p25/p75) is sourced from Eurostat SES 2022 and OECD Taxing Wages 2024 where available; cells are null for countries where the source does not publish percentile breakdowns.

Frequently Asked Questions