What the latest CSO quarterly numbers say about Irish pay right now

The most recent earnings figures the Central Statistics Office has published cover Q1 2026. Average weekly earnings across the economy were €1,076, which annualises to €55,930. Most of the salary data anyone quotes about Ireland describes 2024; this describes 2026, and it is the only reading of the labour market available that is less than a year old.

It is also the most easily misread number the CSO produces, so it is worth spending a paragraph on what it is before using it for anything.

Why this figure is bigger than the one on every other page

Two things separate €55,930 from the €44,816 median that the rest of this site reports for 2024. The first is arithmetic: the quarterly series reports weekly earnings, and annualising means multiplying by 52. That assumes every employee is paid at that rate for a full year, which nobody in seasonal, part-year, or interrupted employment is. The second matters more. The quarterly figure is an average, and the annual figure this site defaults to is a median. Averages in earnings data are pulled upward by high earners; medians are not.

The size of that second effect is easy to demonstrate. The annualised Q1 2026 figure sits +24.8% against the 2024 annual median — a gap that looks like a year of extraordinary pay growth, and is not. Set it against the 2024 annual mean of €56,356 instead and the difference is -0.8%. Almost the entire apparent jump is the choice of average, not the passage of time. Anyone comparing a quarterly headline to a median salary figure is measuring the shape of the distribution and calling it wage growth.

There is a third difference that no arithmetic fixes. The quarterly series is an employer-reported survey, while the annual figures come from Revenue's administrative records covering every PAYE employment in the State. The two are built differently and the CSO does not treat them as interchangeable. The quarterly numbers are best used for direction and timing — what has moved since this time last year — rather than as a level to compare against anything else.

Which sectors moved, and which only look like they moved

Measured against Q1 2025, Administrative and support service activities recorded the largest increase at +7.7%, and Arts, entertainment, recreation and other service activities the largest decrease at -5.2%. That leaves 2 sectors paying less than they did a year earlier: Information and communication and Arts, entertainment, recreation and other service activities. Prices, on the most recent complete year in the CPI series, rose 2.8% — so 8 of the 13 sectors moved faster than that yardstick. The comparison is rough, because the inflation window and the earnings window do not line up exactly, but it is the right order of magnitude for judging whether a sector's increase was a raise or a rounding error.

The reason that last column compares one quarter to the same quarter a year earlier, rather than to the quarter before it, is visible in the underlying series. Financial, insurance and real estate activities reported +18.7% in Q1 2026 against its average over the three preceding quarters — a swing that would read as a dramatic pay event if you looked at consecutive quarters. Its year-on-year change is +2.7%. The difference is bonus and premium payments, which land in the same quarter each year and inflate whichever quarter catches them. Comparing like quarters removes the effect; comparing consecutive quarters manufactures a story out of it.

The spread across sectors remains the dominant fact in the table. Information and communication annualises to €94,880 and Accommodation and food service activities to €24,392, a ratio of 3.89 to one. A year of divergent sector movements barely disturbs that ordering, which is what you would expect: sector pay gaps are built over decades, and the last decade of sector pay growth is the better place to watch them form.

Reading the next release

This page rebuilds from the CSO's published series, so the quarter named at the top will change roughly three months after each quarter ends. Two habits make the next release more useful than the headline that accompanies it.

The first is to check the year-on-year column before the level. A sector paying well is not the same as a sector paying better, and the two get conflated constantly in coverage of these releases — Information and communication is the best-paid sector in the table and not among the fastest-moving, which is the sort of distinction that gets lost in a headline. If you are tracking your own sector, its page — Administrative and support service activities, say — carries the longer annual series alongside these quarterly readings.

The second is to distrust any single quarter, including this one. The series above holds 8 quarters of history, barely enough to distinguish a trend from a wobble, and the sample is a survey of employers rather than a full count. A sector that moves several points in one quarter and back the next has told you nothing. A sector that moves in the same direction for four consecutive year-on-year comparisons has told you something real — and by then the annual data, which is the series worth benchmarking a salary against, will have caught up and confirmed it.

Source: CSO EHQ03 (Earnings and Labour Costs), average weekly earnings by NACE sector for Q1 2026, annualised by multiplying by 52. Annual comparison figures are from DEA06 (2024) and inflation from CPM01 (2025 against 2024). EHQ03 is employer-reported and is not directly comparable with the Revenue-based annual series; both are shown here so the difference can be seen rather than assumed. Data last refreshed 2026-07-27. Full detail on both series is on the methodology page.