What Australians actually earn

Every year the Australian Taxation Office publishes what the country actually declared. Not a survey, not a sample of job ads — the tax returns themselves, aggregated into a percentile distribution. It is the closest thing Australia has to a definitive account of what individuals earn. Two features of it do most of the work in this article: where the middle of the distribution sits, and how long the tail above it runs.

The figures below come from ATO Taxation Statistics 2023-24 — the most recent edition, covering the income year that ended on 30 June 2024. The single most useful number in the whole release: the median taxable income was $70,664.

Who is actually being counted

Before any of the numbers mean anything, three definitions have to be pinned down, because each one shifts the result by thousands of dollars.

These are individuals, not households. Every figure on this page describes one person's tax return. Household income — the thing most people are thinking of when they compare themselves to others — is a different measure entirely, and two people each sitting exactly at the median are jointly a long way above it.

The ladder counts taxable individuals. That means people who lodged a return and had taxable income above zero. People who lodged with nil taxable income are excluded from it. That exclusion matters: on the ATO's broader “all individuals” basis, which includes them, the median falls to $58,739 — $11,925 below the taxable-individual median.

It counts dollars, not hours. There is no full-time adjustment anywhere in this data. Someone who worked three months of the year appears at three months of pay. Part-time workers appear at their part-time earnings. That is a large share of the population sitting in the lower rungs of the ladder, and it is the main reason the median taxable income is well below what a full-time salary survey would report.

One further point of vocabulary: taxable income is assessable income minus allowable deductions. It is not the same as gross salary. Deductions pull it down; investment income, business income and net capital gains push it up.

The percentile ladder

Each row is the entry point for that percentile — the income you need to reach to be in that position among taxable individuals.

Read down the table and the spacing does something specific: it stretches. The step from the 25th percentile to the median is $24,721. From the median to the 75th is $37,534. From the 75th to the 90th is $48,759. From the 90th to the 99th it is $149,097 — nine percentiles that cover more ground than the bottom ninety combined.

That shape is not an artefact. Income is bounded below at zero and unbounded above, so the distribution has a long right tail and a compressed left one. Practically, it means that near the middle a pay rise moves you several percentiles, and near the top it barely moves you at all. You can place a specific figure on this ladder with the income percentile tool.

Why the median and the average disagree

On the all-individuals basis the median was $58,739 and the mean was $78,127. The average is $19,388 higher — about 33% above the median. Both numbers are correct; they answer different questions.

The median is the person in the middle: half above, half below. It ignores how far above the top earners are. The mean adds every income together and divides, so a single very large return lifts it and no return can pull it down below zero. Given a tail that runs from the 99th percentile at $306,054 to figures far beyond that, the mean sits well clear of where the typical person actually is. Whenever a headline uses “average income”, that gap is the thing to check.

The same split shows up between men and women. These figures come from the ATO's summary tables rather than the percentile ladder, so they sit on the all-individuals basis and are not directly comparable with the rungs above.

The female median is $16,485 below the male median, or 76% of it. This is not a like-for-like pay comparison. It is total taxable income with no adjustment for hours worked, months worked, industry or occupation, all of which are mixed into the one figure.

The top 10%, 5% and 1%

The ATO also publishes the entry point for each top group. These are the thresholds most people are curious about, and they are higher than the corresponding rungs on the ladder.

Those differences deserve an honest explanation rather than a quiet rounding. The percentile ladder and the top-group thresholds are compiled from different ATO tables, over different populations, and they do not reconcile to the dollar. The 90th percentile and the top-10% entry point are describing nominally the same boundary and land $6,015 apart; at the top 1% the two figures are $123,477 apart.

The gap widens as you go up for the reason the ladder itself stretches. Where nine percentiles span $149,097, very few people sit at any given dollar amount, so a small change in which returns are counted moves the threshold a long way. The practical rule is to read each series within itself: compare an income to the ladder, or to the top-group thresholds, but do not mix the two and expect them to line up.

What the highest-earning occupations declare

Occupation and postcode data comes from an older release — the 2022-23 income year, one edition earlier than the ATO Taxation Statistics 2023-24 figures above. Comparisons between the two are indicative only. These are also averages, not medians, so the same right-tail effect operates inside each occupation.

Medicine takes six of the twelve places, and the top of the list is a long way clear of everything else: the surgeon average of $472,475 is roughly 6.7 times the median taxable income. Two of the twelve averages exceed the $429,531 top-1% entry point, which means a typical member of those occupations is in the top percentile of the country.

The ATO groups these figures by the occupation recorded on the return, and an average across an occupation says nothing about the range inside it. A first-year practitioner and a thirty-year specialist are both in the same bucket.

Where the highest-earning postcodes are

7 of the ten are in New South Wales, clustered in Sydney's eastern suburbs and along the harbour. Every postcode on this list has an average above the $208,281 top-5% entry point — across different years, but the point stands: these are small areas where the average resident is an unusually high earner.

Postcode averages are fragile in a way medians are not. A handful of very large returns in a small population lifts the whole figure, so these numbers describe the presence of high earners more reliably than they describe a typical resident.

The limits of this data

The ladder is one year's snapshot of a population, not a picture of anyone's career. Individual incomes move up and down the distribution over a working life, and a single year captures part-year workers, career breaks and one-off capital gains without distinguishing any of them.

Every figure here is also pre-tax. Two people on the same taxable income can take home different amounts once the Medicare levy, a study loan or the surcharge apply — the take-home pay calculator works through that arithmetic, and how Australian income tax works explains the mechanics. And nothing here adjusts for cost of living, so the same income does not buy the same life in every postcode on that last table.

The ATO refreshes these tables annually, roughly two years behind the income year they describe. Where the figures on this page carry a different vintage — as the occupation and postcode tables do — that is stated on the table rather than smoothed over.