Peak earning years in Ireland: how pay rises and falls with age

Nobody in this data ever gets older. That is the first thing to understand about an age-earnings curve, and it changes what the numbers can be used for. The CSO figures below are a snapshot of 2024: they compare a 24-year-old working today with a 45-year-old working today, two different people whose careers began two decades apart under different economies. The curve describes the shape of the workforce right now. It is not a forecast of any individual's pay, and where it turns downward that is usually a change in who is still working rather than a cut anyone received.

Read with that caution, the shape is still striking. Pay in Ireland climbs +120.7% from the 15 - 24 years band to its peak in the 40 - 49 years band, and almost all of that climb is over within a decade of starting work.

The ladder, band by band

The CSO publishes this breakdown county by county rather than as one national series, so the figures here are a population-weighted composite of all 26 county medians — Dublin counts for more than Leitrim, in proportion to how many people live there.

The single largest move in the whole table is the first one. Going from 15 - 24 years to 25 - 29 years adds +71.9%, taking the median from €23,183 to €39,852. Some of that is genuine early-career progression, but a good part of it is the youngest band emptying out: the 15 - 24 years group is full of students working part-time and part-year, and those employments drag its median down in a way that has little to do with hourly rates. By the second band almost everyone counted is working full-year.

After that the increases shrink fast. The step into 40 - 49 years is worth +4.6% — the last real raise the curve records. Whatever happens to earnings after the early thirties, the aggregate stops registering it as growth.

The plateau is longer than the climb

Between 30 - 39 years and 50 - 59 years the median moves by 1%. Three age bands covering roughly thirty years of working life sit within a tenth of each other, and within a tenth of the peak. The popular idea of a career as a steadily rising line is not what the national data shows; it shows a fast climb through the twenties and then three decades of near-flat pay.

This is where the snapshot problem bites hardest. A flat plateau does not mean individual salaries stop rising at 30 — plenty of people are promoted at 42. It means that the extra pay those promotions bring is offset, in aggregate, by everyone else in the band whose pay tracked general wage drift, and by the fact that the 50 - 59 years cohort entered the labour market in a different decade with different starting salaries. The plateau is a statement about the workforce, not about a career.

The fall after the plateau is the sharpest single move in the table apart from the first climb: -21.9% into the 60 years and over band, leaving it 26.1% below the peak.

The steepest curve in Ireland is not Dublin's

Running the same calculation county by county produces curves of very different steepness. Kildare has the sharpest in the country: pay there climbs +152.6% from €22,558 in the 15 - 24 years band to €56,980 at its 40 - 49 years peak. Dublin is steep too, at +137.4%, but it ranks 4th of 26. At the other end, Longford climbs +78.3% — a 74.3-point spread between the steepest and flattest counties in the same country.

The most useful column in that table is the top row. In the 15 - 24 years band, Dublin pays +0.1% against Longford — close to nothing. By the 40 - 49 years band the same comparison is +36.8%. Young workers earn roughly the same wherever in Ireland they are; the geography of Irish pay is something that happens to people in their thirties and forties. The capital's advantage is not paid at the door, which is worth knowing before a move — the Dublin premium sector by sector is the other half of that picture.

21 of the 26 counties peak in the 40 - 49 years band, so the timing is consistent nationally even where the height is not. Those that peak earlier tend to have the flattest curves: without a local base of senior professional and management roles, there is less at the top of the ladder to climb toward.

The fall after the peak is mostly not a pay cut

The 60 years and over median sits at €37,811, 26.1% below the peak. Read literally, that says Irish workers take a substantial cut in their sixties. Read carefully, it mostly says something about who is still in the count.

Three things happen at once in that band. Higher earners retire earlier, because they can afford to, which removes the top of the distribution first. Many of those who stay move to part-time or reduced hours, and the CSO's annual figures record actual earnings rather than full-time-equivalent rates, so three days a week is counted as a lower salary. And the band is unbounded at the top end in age, mixing 61-year-old senior managers with 68-year-olds working occasional shifts.

What survives all that is a real and useful finding: the years when Irish pay is highest are the forties, the climb to get there is almost entirely completed in the twenties, and the difference between counties barely exists at the start of a career and is substantial by the middle of one. If you want the distribution rather than the middle of it — what the top and bottom of each of these bands actually looks like — the percentile ladder is the better tool.

Source: CSO DEA06 (Annual Earnings by County), age-band medians for 2024, built from Revenue PAYE administrative records. Because DEA06 publishes age bands per county rather than nationally, the national curve above is a composite of all 26 county medians weighted by Census 2022 population; county figures are as published. Earnings data last refreshed 2026-07-27. Sources, suppression rules, and the limits of this data are set out on the methodology page.