Ireland's best and worst sectors for pay growth since 2011

In 2011, the best-paid sector in Ireland was Education, on a median of €47,577. By 2024 it is Information and Communication, on €80,147. That reshuffle is the short version of what has happened to Irish pay since 2011: the sector you work in has mattered far more than the year you asked for a raise.

Across the 13 sectors the CSO reports, nominal growth over the period ranges from +70.8% down to +14.4% — a spread of 56.4 points. Consumer prices rose 24.3% over the same years, which puts a hard line through the middle of that range. Everything above it is a real pay rise. Everything below it is not.

The sectors that pulled away

Information and Communication is the outlier, and not narrowly. Its median went from €46,915 to €80,147, a nominal gain of +70.8% and +37.4% after inflation. To keep pace with prices alone it would only have needed to reach €58,311; it cleared that by €21,836 a year. No other sector is close. The ranking churned beneath it too: Professional, Scientific and Technical Activities climbed from 8th to 5th on pay over the 13 years, the largest move of any sector.

Administrative and Support Service Activities at +53.3% and Professional, Scientific and Technical Activities at +51.4% form a second tier behind it. These three have little in common as workplaces, but they share an exposure to the internationally traded side of the economy, where wage setting answers to competition for staff rather than to domestic budgets. Set against the national median, which rose +35.2% over the same years, 6 of the 13 sectors outpaced it.

The sectors that stood still

Education is at the bottom, and it is the more interesting end of the table. Its median rose +14.4% in cash terms — a real number of euros, and one that would look like progress on a payslip. Against 24.3% inflation it is a real loss of 8%, or about €4,721 a year of purchasing power. Transportation and Storage is next, at +18.7% nominal and -4.5% real.

Transportation and Storage and Education are the 2 sectors where the typical worker is worse off in real terms than in 2011. The rest gained, but many gained little: the middle of the table clusters within a few points of the national figure, which is what wage drift looks like when nothing structural changes.

The distance between the top and bottom of the table widened accordingly. In 2011 the best-paid sector paid 2.61 times the worst-paid; by 2024 it paid 3.08 times.

What these growth rates are actually counting

A sector's median is not a person, and a decade of change in it is not a decade of raises. The CSO groups employments into broad NACE categories, so Information and Communication covers everyone from a call-centre operator to a principal engineer. If a sector adds a large number of high-paid roles — which is close to a description of what happened at the top of this table — its median rises without a single existing employee being paid more. Some of the +70.8% at the top is composition, not compensation.

The same mechanism runs the other way at the bottom. A sector that expands by hiring at entry level will show weak median growth even if it treats its long-serving staff well. And because these figures come from Revenue PAYE records, self-employed and contractor income is invisible throughout, which understates parts of construction and the arts in particular. The numbers are an accurate account of what PAYE employments in each sector paid; they are a weaker account of what happened to any given career inside one.

All 13 sectors, nominal and real

What a decade of sector data is good for

The honest use of this table is as a check on direction rather than as career advice. A sector at the top has been re-rating for 13 years, which tells you the demand for its skills has been persistent rather than cyclical — but it also means the easy part of that re-rating has already happened, and the pay you would join on today already reflects it. Information and Communication is the clearest example: the growth is real, and it is also priced in.

A sector at the bottom is the more actionable signal, because slow median growth in a sector whose work is not going away usually means pay is set by something other than the market — collective agreements, public pay scales, or a funding model that does not flex. Education is worth looking at on its own page for that reason. In sectors like these, individual negotiation moves less than it does elsewhere, and the realistic route to higher pay tends to run through grade and qualification structures rather than through asking.

Either way, the inflation column is the one to bring to a pay review. A raise below 1.9% a year, roughly the average pace of the last 13 years, leaves you slightly poorer than the year before. That is the same arithmetic applied to the country as a whole in Irish salaries versus inflation, and it produces the same uncomfortable conclusion at both scales.

Source: CSO DEA08 (Annual Earnings by Sector), median annual earnings by NACE sector, 2011 to 2024, built from Revenue PAYE administrative records. Inflation adjustment uses CPM01 (Consumer Price Index); real figures deflate 2024 earnings to 2011 price levels, and both nominal and real values are shown so the adjustment can be checked. Earnings data last refreshed 2026-07-27. Sector definitions, suppression rules, and known limitations are on the methodology page.