Where Ireland's gender pay gap is widest — and where it has closed

In Cork, the median man earned €52,359 in 2024 and the median woman earned €40,427: a gap of 23%, or €11,932 a year. In Sligo, the same two figures are €44,065 and €40,911 — a gap of 7%, worth €3,154. Cork and Kildare share the widest gap in the country at 23%. Between those two ends lies a 16-point range that the national conversation about the pay gap mostly does not acknowledge.

There is a reason to resist quoting a single national number here, and it is not caution for its own sake. Medians do not add up: you cannot average 26 county medians and get the median for the country, because the counties are wildly different sizes. What follows is the unweighted mean of the county gaps, 15.8%, which is a summary of the map rather than a measure of the nation. The site's gender pay gap page reports the same figure with the same caveat attached.

The widest five and the narrowest five

The gap is wider where the money is

Read the two halves of that table as places rather than as rankings and the pattern is hard to miss. The wide end is made up of counties with large multinational manufacturing and professional employers. The narrow end is made up of counties where the biggest employers are the health service, schools, local government, and agriculture. Averaged across the best-paid third of counties the gap is 19%; across the worst-paid third it is 14.5%. The richer third is 4.5 points wider.

The mechanism is the shape of the local pay ladder rather than anything about how a given employer treats a given employee. A county with a long ladder — a wide spread between its ordinary jobs and its best-paid ones — converts any imbalance in who reaches the top rungs into a large euro gap. A county whose pay is compressed into public-sector scales cannot produce a wide gap even if the same imbalance exists, because there is nowhere for the top to run to.

Sligo makes the point in the most counter-intuitive way available. Its 7% gap is not the result of men there earning little: the county's female median ranks 5th of 26 nationally while its male median ranks 18th. Women in Sligo are comparatively well paid, and the gap closes from the top rather than from the bottom. Elsewhere in the narrow half of the table, the same statistic means something less encouraging — men and women earning similarly modest amounts.

What this number is measuring

The figures above are unadjusted gaps: the difference between two medians, with nothing controlled for. That is a legitimate measure and a widely used one, but it answers a specific question — how much less do women in this county earn in total — and not the question most people assume it answers.

Three things sit inside every number in the table. Hours are the largest: these are annual earnings, so a workforce in which women are more likely to work part-time will show a gap even where hourly rates are identical, and part-time patterns vary a good deal between counties. Occupation is the second: the gap reflects which jobs men and women hold locally, and a county whose best-paid sector employs mostly men will report a wide gap regardless of pay policy within that sector. Career interruption is the third, and it compounds the other two over a working life. None of that makes the gap unreal — the money is genuinely absent from the household — but a 16-point difference between counties is mostly a difference in industrial structure, not a league table of employer behaviour. The sector-by-sector premium analysis shows how sharply that structure varies from one county to the next.

Almost everywhere, it has narrowed

Set the latest figures against the start of the series and the direction is consistent. The mean county gap was 20.2% in 2011 and is 15.8% now, and 23 of the 26 counties narrowed over that period. Carlow, Cavan and Monaghan did not. Wicklow moved furthest, from 28% to 20%.

A 4.4-point improvement over 13 years is real and slow. Continue at that rate and the average county closes the remaining 15.8 points in 2071. The counties that have moved least are not the ones with the least room. It is also worth noting which side did the work. Since 2011 the female median has risen 37.1% in the average county against 29.9% for the male median, and women gained ground faster in 23 of the 26 counties. The gap has closed because one line rose faster, not because the two lines converged on hours or occupation — which is to say the structural part of the gap is the part still standing. County-level detail for both genders, year by year, sits on the individual county pages, starting with Cork.

Source: all figures are from the CSO's DEA06 (Annual Earnings by County), median annual earnings by county and sex, built from Revenue PAYE administrative records and covering 2011 to 2024. The gap is calculated as the male median minus the female median, expressed as a percentage of the male median, and is unadjusted for hours worked, occupation, or years of experience. Earnings data last refreshed 2026-07-27. Full detail on coverage and suppression is on the methodology page.