Earnings by economic branch and occupation

Topic

Wage, salary, earnings, pay, remuneration of public officials: there are many terms describing the income that persons employed receive for being available in the labour market. Gross salary is the salary agreed upon with the employer, before deduction of taxes and social security contributions.
The average salary of full-time employees in Germany amounted to 4,105 euros in gross terms in April 2022. The individual salary usually differs from the average salary and depends on a variety of factors. They include sex, age and educational attainment as well as job-related variables such as level of qualification required in the job, occupation or extent of employment. Enterprise-related variables such as economic branch, enterprise size and collective bargaining coverage, can also have an effect on the salary.
Only one third of the persons employed earn more than the average salary. When shown in a graphical presentation, salaries show a right-skewed distribution. This means that just under two thirds of the persons employed receive a monthly salary that is lower than the average salary.

Press releases

23 March 2023 Short-distance transport: Proportion of the 55 plus age group among bus and tram drivers above average

Smoothly running short-distance transport is crucial for the envisaged transformation of mobility. This requires bus and tram drivers especially for the introduction of the Germany ticket in public short-distance passenger transport. However, many of the roughly 137,000 people in that job in Germany will probably withdraw from economic activity in the next few years. In 2021, just over one third (36%) of the bus and tram drivers were aged 55 or over. This is reported by the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis). The proportion of the 55 plus age group thus was markedly higher than among all persons in employment (25%).

14 December 2022 Below-average increase of 6% in earnings of postal and parcel service employees in the last ten years

11 May 2022 Number of people working in hospital nursing care up 18% in ten years

4 May 2022 Truck traffic: one third of all professional drivers are aged 55 or over

20 December 2021 7.8 million low-wage jobs in April 2021

14 December 2020 Temporary work in 2018: median gross hourly earnings 24% below those of the total economy

Further Press Releases

Tables

Earnings by sectors

Database

GENESIS-Online

More data on earnings by economic branch and occupation are available from the GENESIS-Online database.

The database content will continuously be extended, and links will be provided here.

Graphics

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Distribution of the gross monthly earnings of full-time employees in April 2023

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Economic Activities with the highest and lowest earnings in April 2023

Quality Reports

Quality Report - Quarterly Earnings Survey

Purpose of the statistics: Data input for several sets of short-term economic and structural statistics, representation of short-term trends in gross earnings and working hours (by sex and performance group) as well as information on the short-term economic development, risks to price stability and international competitiveness.

download file "Quality Report - Quarterly Earnings Survey" (PDF, 178KB, File does not meet accessibility standards)

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