The Australian Tax Office just released a bunch of data from the 2018-2019 financial year, and yes it includes juicy details like what the highest-paying Aussie salary is, as well as just the average salary for us regular plebes.
I know you’re all itching to find out how much money everyone you know is making, because we are all gossipy fiends obsessed with one-upping each other, so await no longer.
The average salary in Australia right now is $63,085, up by $1634 from the previous year. Not bad, right?
If that’s higher than you were expecting (it’s a sad time), it’s because the ‘average’ is probably not the most accurate way to gauge this info.
The *median* reported salary, which gives us a far better picture of the ‘average’ Aussie since it isn’t skewed higher by those pesky millionaires, was $52,732. Yep. If 63k was a little higher than I was expecting, $52k was definitely a little lower.
And you know what makes $52k seem like peanuts? Knowing that the highest-paid people in Australia right now are surgeons, who on average earn $394,303!!!
I can’t believe my South Asian parents failed at their one duty of pushing me into medicine. Now here I am, with a media degree, and definitely not about to report an income of nearly $400k.
The surgeons were closely followed by anaesthetists on $386,065, and then internal medicine specialists on $304,752. Financial dealers earned $275,984, mining engineers $184,507, and chief executive officers raked in $164,896.
I’ll be honest, I don’t really know what a financial dealer or chief executive officer actually *does*, but whatever it is, is it too late for me to pursue it??
I’m surprised politicians weren’t in the list, since I can tell you for a fact that some of them are earning over $400,000 – but I guess it’s not a good look, is it.
When you break down people’s income by area, it’s no surprise that NSW has most of the high-income earners. I love living in over-priced Shitney where everything costs an arm and a leg and it takes 11 months to actually move because there’s never any good rentals in your budget.
Australia’s boujiest suburb was Double Bay in Sydney (wow, what a shocker), where people made an average taxable income of fkn $202,598. I hate everyone. The second was unsurprisingly Toorak in Melbourne, with an average income of $201,926.
The only suburb in the top 10 that was NOT in NSW or Victoria was Cottesloe in Western Australia. I don’t know who these people are or if they even really exist, but they’re pulling in an average income of $179,376.
Anyway, now that we’re all feeling distinctly humbled and maybe even a little attacked, I have the displeasure of sharing with you the fact that this new data also showed a significant gap in income according to gender.
The average salary reported by men was around 55k, while for women it was around 40k. A whopping 15k of a gap. I love being a woman living under a patriarchal society.
The Australian Tax Office released a lot more data on the top 10 postcodes and professions based on their ridiculously high average salary, and you can peruse the rest here.
