National Salary Percentile Calculator
See where your gross annual salary sits on your country's per-capita household welfare distribution, and how it compares with the country's average and minimum wage.
Derived figures
- Earnings, hours and minimum wage — derived from ILOSTAT (hours worked, minimum wage); World Bank PIP (income distribution) (Per-country most recent ILOSTAT observation) using Hours worked and minimum wage are ILOSTAT's published figures. The earnings percentiles are NOT published earnings percentiles: they are a lognormal fit to World Bank PIP's median and Gini, which measure per-capita household welfare rather than individual employment earnings, so they sit below a full-time salary for the same country.
How this is calculated
Your salary is interpolated in log-earnings space against national percentile points (10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, 90th), then compared to the country's mean wage and statutory minimum wage where one exists. Log-space interpolation is used because wage distributions are right-skewed — a small number of very high earners pulls the mean well above the median — so interpolating on the raw scale would distort percentiles in the middle and upper part of the distribution.
Using this calculator's default of a $75,000 gross salary in the US, that figure lands above the 90th percentile point — but read that carefully, because the percentile points describe per-capita household welfare rather than wages. Household welfare counts everyone, including children and people not in work, so a single full-time salary sits much higher against it than it would against a distribution of wage earners alone. The average-wage and minimum-wage multiples shown alongside it are the direct wage comparison: $75,000 is roughly twice the US average wage and about five times the federal minimum. To see what this salary would be worth in another country, see the Cross-Country Equivalent Salary calculator.
Frequently asked questions
- What's the difference from the income percentile calculator?
- Less than you might expect. Both rank you against the same underlying distribution — per-capita household welfare — so neither is a wage-specific ranking. What differs here is the extra wage context: this page also shows your salary as a multiple of the country's average wage and its minimum wage, which are wage measures rather than welfare ones.
- Why is multipleOfMinWage sometimes blank?
- Some countries have no statutory national minimum wage (pay is set by collective bargaining or sector agreements instead), so that comparison isn't meaningful there.
- What does salary percentile mean?
- It places your salary on your country's per-capita household welfare distribution, fitted to a lognormal curve from that country's median and Gini coefficient. A percentile of 80 means your salary exceeds the welfare level of roughly 80% of people in that country. It is not the share of wage earners who earn less than you: household welfare counts everyone, including children and people not in work, so a full-time salary ranks higher against it than it would against a distribution of wages alone.
- What data source is used for salary distributions?
- The percentile points (10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, 90th) are fitted to your country's median and Gini coefficient for per-capita household welfare, and your salary is interpolated between them in log space. The average-wage and minimum-wage figures are separate wage measures, not points on that curve.
- Does this use gross or net salary?
- Gross salary — before income tax, social security contributions, and other deductions. This matches how most published wage statistics are reported, making the comparison consistent across countries with very different tax systems.
- How does my national percentile compare to global?
- National and global percentiles can differ substantially — a salary that ranks in the middle of earners nationally in a high-income country can rank far higher globally, since national wage distributions reflect local cost of living and productivity, not global purchasing power.
- What counts as salary for this calculation?
- Gross annual employment income from a primary job — base pay plus regular bonuses, before tax. It does not separately account for irregular income, investment income, or self-employment earnings, which national wage statistics typically don't capture in the same way.
- How often is the salary data updated?
- The underlying earnings distribution data is refreshed periodically as new national statistics are published — typically annually — rather than in real time.