Where Irish salaries go furthest: pay vs rent in all 26 counties

The highest median salary in Ireland is in Dublin, at €49,224 — 9.8% above the national median of €44,816. The same county has the worst salary-to-rent ratio in the country. Both statements come from the same two official datasets, and reconciling them is most of what anyone deciding where to live in Ireland actually needs to know.

Measuring what a salary is worth locally

A salary figure on its own ranks counties by what employers pay. It says nothing about what the money buys. The simplest correction is to divide the median annual salary by average annual rent, which gives the number of years of rent a single year's pay would cover. Higher is better. A county scoring 3.40 means one median salary covers 3.40 years of average rent; a county scoring 1.90 means it covers 1.90.

Across the 26 counties the ratio runs from 1.90 to 3.40, with the midpoint around 2.81. Expressed the other way round, rent consumes 53% of a median salary in Dublin and 29% in Leitrim. That is a wider spread than anything in the earnings data itself — pay varies between counties by a few tens of percent, while the share of income going to rent nearly doubles.

The ranking

The top of the table is not a list of well-paid counties. Leitrim has a median salary of €41,162, 8.2% below the national figure, and leads the ranking anyway because average rent there is €1,010 a month. The pattern holds down the list: these are counties where pay is modest and housing is cheap enough that the modest pay goes further than a large salary does elsewhere.

At the other end, the squeeze is concentrated in a small group of counties containing Ireland's largest urban centres and their immediate hinterland.

The Dublin trap

Dublin pays the highest median salary of any county and finishes 26th of 26 on this ranking — last. The arithmetic is not subtle. A Dublin salary is 19.6% higher than Leitrim's. Dublin rent is 114.1% higher. A pay premium in the tens of percent cannot absorb a rent premium that large.

Following the money to the end of the calculation makes it concrete. After average rent, the median Dublin worker has €23,284 of gross pay left for the year. In Clare, which pays €44,081, the figure is €29,893 — €6,609 more, on a smaller salary. Ranked by what remains after rent rather than by rent's share of income, Dublin finishes 26th of 26. It is the worst county in Ireland on both measures despite paying the most.

This is not an argument that nobody should work in Dublin. The county's advantage is the range of work available rather than the headline median: sectors that barely register elsewhere in the country have real depth there, and for some careers the alternative is not a cheaper county but a different job. The Dublin county page shows how far its sector mix diverges from the national pattern. The point is narrower — the pay premium is real, and the housing market takes more than all of it.

The commuter belt does not resolve it

The standard response to expensive city rent is to move one county out and commute. The data suggests this trades less than people expect. Among the counties ringing the capital, ratios run from 2.49 in Meath down to 2.23 in Wicklow, against a national midpoint near 2.81. Every one of them sits in the bottom half of the table.

Rent in the commuter counties has largely converged on city levels while local median salaries have not. Wicklow carries a rent burden of 45% of median pay, just 8 points below Dublin's 53%. Someone who moves out to save on rent, keeps a city job, and adds a daily commute is buying a modest improvement in the ratio at a real cost in time and transport that this data does not capture. The counties that genuinely change the arithmetic are the ones far enough out that commuting is not the plan.

What the ratio does not tell you

Three limits are worth stating plainly. The first is a timing mismatch: earnings are for 2024 and rents for 2025 H2, because the two datasets publish on different schedules. Rents have risen since 2024, so the ratios here are, if anything, slightly generous.

The second is that the RTB rent figures cover newly registered tenancies, not what every existing tenant pays. Long-standing renters in rent-pressure zones typically pay less than these averages, so the figures describe the cost of moving into a county rather than the cost of already living there.

The third is the household assumption. This compares one median salary against the full rent of an average dwelling. Two earners splitting the same rent roughly double every ratio in the table, and the counties with the worst ratios are exactly where sharing is most common. Read the ranking as a comparison between counties, not as a budget.

For the underlying figures by county, the county index lists median pay alongside local rent, and the highest-paying counties ranks the same places on pay alone — the two orderings disagree almost completely. Whether pay has kept up with prices more generally is a separate question, covered in Irish salaries versus inflation.

Source: salary figures are from the CSO's DEA06 (Annual Earnings by County), median annual earnings for 2024, built from Revenue PAYE administrative records. Rent figures are from RIH02 (RTB Average Rent), average monthly rent by county for 2025 H2, reported through the CSO. Annual rent is monthly rent multiplied by twelve; the ratio is median annual salary divided by annual rent. Data last refreshed 2026-07-27. Sources, limitations, and update schedules are set out in full on the methodology page.