How to benchmark your salary against CSO data

Most people benchmark their pay by comparing it to one number: the national average. That comparison is close to useless, and not because the number is wrong. It describes every employee in the State — every sector, every county, every age, full-year and part-year alike — which means it describes almost nobody in particular. Five adjustments turn it into something you can act on, and each one is a lookup rather than a calculation.

The walkthrough below follows a single example the whole way down: someone working in Information and Communication in Limerick, in the 40 - 49 years age band. Limerick is used because its median of €44,498 is the closest of any county to the national one, which makes it a fair stand-in for an unremarkable local market. Substitute your own sector, county, and age band as you go.

Start from the median, not the average

The mean annual salary in 2024 was €56,356 and the median was €44,816 — a gap of 25.7%. The mean is the total wage bill divided by the number of employees, so a small number of very large salaries lift it well above the middle of the distribution. The median is the salary of the person standing exactly halfway along the queue, and it moves only when the middle moves.

Nearly every disappointing salary comparison starts by using the wrong one of these. Someone earning €44,816 is, by definition, doing better than half the employees in Ireland. Measured against the mean instead, the same salary comes out at -20.5%, and reads as falling short of something. Use the median for every step that follows, and treat any figure quoted as "the average Irish salary" as a number that needs checking before it means anything.

Move to your sector, then your county

Sector is the single largest adjustment available. Information and Communication records a median of €80,147, +78.8% against the national figure — a bigger gap than any county, age band, or year of experience will produce. The sector index lists all of them; find yours before touching anything geographic.

County comes next, and here there is a trap worth avoiding. Limerick's all-ages median is -0.7% against the national one, so the obvious move is to apply that near-identical ratio to the sector figure and conclude that Information and Communication pays about €79,578 there. The CSO publishes that exact combination, and the real figure is €58,736 — the shortcut overshoots by 35.5%.

The reason is that a national sector median is not portable. It is an average across counties that host very different amounts of that sector, and for a concentrated industry most of the weight sits in a handful of them. A county can be entirely ordinary overall and still be a long way below the national figure for one particular sector, because the roles driving that national figure are somewhere else. The county ratio tells you about the county's whole workforce and nothing about your corner of it. Take the published sector-by-county figure from the county index whenever it exists, and fall back to a ratio only where the CSO has suppressed the cell for confidentiality.

Adjust for your age band

Age is a proxy for experience and it is the last large adjustment. In Limerick the 40 - 49 years band earns €49,891 against the county's all-ages median of €44,498, a factor of 1.121. At the other end, the 15 - 24 years band sits at a factor of 0.519. Applying the peak factor to the sector-and-county figure gives €65,843 as the benchmark for the worked example.

This step is the roughest of the five, and it is worth knowing why. The age factor is drawn from all employees in the county rather than from your sector within it, and career curves are not the same shape everywhere — a sector that hires mainly graduates has a flatter one than a sector built on long apprenticeships. Treat the age-adjusted figure as a range rather than a target.

Place yourself on the percentile ladder

A single benchmark figure tells you whether you are above or below a line. The percentile ladder tells you how far, which is the more useful thing to know when preparing for a pay conversation. In Limerick, half of employees earn less than €44,499, a quarter earn more than €67,162, and a tenth earn more than €94,378. The worked example's €65,843 lands around the 74th percentile locally.

The rungs are not evenly spaced, and that changes what a given gap means. The distance from the median to the top quarter is far larger than the distance from the bottom quarter to the median, so being a few thousand euro below a benchmark near the top of the ladder is a much smaller positional difference than the same shortfall near the bottom. Nationally the top tenth of employees starts at €99,913; what it takes to join the top 10% sets out the full ladder and why the average salary sits so far above the middle of it.

Close the gap between 2024 and today

Everything above describes 2024. The annual earnings series is built from Revenue records and is published roughly 12 to 18 months after the year it covers, so the most recent complete picture available always describes a year that has already ended — here, 2024 rather than now. Negotiating against it without adjustment means negotiating against the market as it was.

The quarterly series closes some of that gap. It runs to Q1 2026 and reports average weekly earnings by sector. Information and Communication moved -0.6% against Q1 2025; carrying the worked example forward by that much gives €65,448. Use the quarterly number this way — as a rate of change applied to the annual figure — and not as a level. It is an employer-reported survey of weekly pay rather than a count of annual earnings from tax records, the two are built on different bases, and the CSO does not treat them as interchangeable.

Two habits keep the whole exercise honest. The first is to carry the adjustments in the order above, largest first, because a mistake in the sector step swamps anything the age step can do. The second is to remember what the underlying data excludes: it covers PAYE employments only, so self-employment, contracting, and profits drawn from a company are outside it entirely, and it reports total taxable pay rather than base salary, meaning bonuses and overtime are already inside every figure you have just compared yourself against.

Source: national, county, and age-band medians are from CSO DEA06 (2024); sector and sector-by-county medians from DEA08 (2024); percentile figures from DEA09 (2024); and the latest quarterly movement from EHQ03 (Q1 2026 against Q1 2025). Percentile placement is linearly interpolated between the published percentiles and is approximate. EHQ03 is employer-reported and is not directly comparable in level with the Revenue-based annual series. Earnings data last refreshed 2026-07-27. Coverage and suppression rules are set out on the methodology page.