Salary vs Cost of Living 2026

Where median pay goes furthest

The default order is months covered: annual median net salary divided by the same ICP-derived monthly single-person basket. Use a column heading to change the server-rendered order; each salary figure links to its cited source and survey vintage.

Local purchasing power by country — take-home, tax-adjusted

Local purchasing power here means what the median worker's after-tax pay actually buys: the national median gross salary from each country's statistical office, netted with the WhereNext per-country tax model, then converted to international dollars at the World Bank ICP 2021 price level. On that basis the strongest take-home purchasing power is Singapore ($69,231 intl.), Switzerland ($55,000 intl.), United States ($46,972 intl.); the weakest of the countries we can source is Vietnam ($8,207 intl.).

This is a different measure from GDP-per-capita PPP tables, which track economy-wide output rather than worker pay, and from crowd-sourced purchasing-power indexes built on self-reported prices and salaries. Every salary input below links to a named statistical-office source with its survey vintage.