What it takes to join Ireland's top 10% of earners

€99,913. That is the line in 2024: earn more than that in a year and nine out of ten Irish employees earn less than you. It is a strangely difficult number to find, given how often people want it, and it is lower than most guesses — roughly 2.23 times the median salary rather than the four or five times that the phrase "top ten per cent" tends to summon.

One qualification belongs here rather than at the end, because it changes who the line applies to. The CSO's distribution is built from PAYE records, so it describes employees. Self-employment income, farm income, rental income, and profits taken out of a company are all outside it, which means a meaningful share of the genuinely high-income population in Ireland does not appear in this data at all. The threshold is what it takes to reach the top tenth of employees — a smaller and more achievable target than the top tenth of earners in the wider sense.

The whole ladder, not just the top rung

The spacing matters more than any single row. From the tenth percentile to the median is €26,558. From the median to the ninetieth is €55,096 — 2.1 times as far. The bottom half of the Irish earnings distribution is compressed into a narrow band, and the top half fans out. That asymmetry is why moving from €30,388 to €44,817 feels like a promotion and moving from €44,817 to €68,319 feels like a different life: the second step is worth €23,502 and the first is worth €14,429.

It also explains why the gap between the top rung and everything below it resists closing. Pay rises are usually expressed as percentages, and a uniform percentage increase widens every euro gap on a ladder shaped like this one.

The average salary is a 62nd-percentile salary

The mean annual salary in 2024 was €56,356, which is 25.7% above the median of €44,817. Placed on the ladder above, that average sits around the 62nd percentile: roughly 62% of employees earn less than the figure usually described as ordinary, and only 38% earn more.

This is what a long upper tail does to an average. The €99,913 threshold and everything above it pull the mean upward, while the compressed bottom half cannot pull it back down by an equivalent amount. Anyone comparing their pay to "the average Irish salary" and finding themselves below it is not necessarily below the middle of anything; they are below a number that is itself in the upper third of the distribution. The average salary page reports both figures side by side for exactly that reason, and the median is the one to use.

The line is not the same line in every county

Being in the top tenth locally and being in the top tenth nationally are different achievements, and they diverge sharply. Only 5 of the 26 counties — Dublin, Wicklow, Kildare, Cork and Meath — set a local threshold above the national €99,913. In the remaining 21, the best-paid tenth of the county starts below the national line, so a salary that makes someone locally exceptional leaves them outside the national top decile. The range is €44,045 wide, from €122,025 in Dublin to €77,980 in Monaghan.

Comparing the rungs against each other sharpens it further. At the top rung the best-paid county is 1.56 times the worst-paid; at the bottom rung the ratio is 1.57; at the median it is only 1.33. Irish counties resemble each other most closely in the middle of their pay distributions and diverge at both ends — at the top because high-paying employers cluster in a few places, at the bottom because part-time and seasonal work does too.

Reading your own position honestly

Three adjustments make this ladder useful rather than merely interesting. The first is to compare against your county's distribution rather than the national one if you have no intention of moving, since that is the market you are actually hiring into. The second is to remember that these are individual earnings, not household income: two people at the median together clear the top-decile threshold, which is why household-level and individual-level statistics about Irish incomes so often seem to contradict each other.

The third is to convert the threshold into what it buys. A salary at the national top-decile line goes a great deal further in some counties than in others, and the two rankings work against each other: Dublin, which sets the highest threshold, is also the most expensive place in the country to rent. The arithmetic of that trade is set out in pay versus rent across all 26 counties. Crossing €99,913 in Dublin and crossing it in Monaghan are the same statistic and not remotely the same outcome.

Source: percentile figures are from the CSO's DEA09 (Distribution of Annual Earnings by County), all employees, 2024, built from Revenue PAYE administrative records. Mean and median annual earnings are from DEA06. The position of the mean on the percentile ladder is linearly interpolated between the published percentiles and is approximate. County populations used to select the largest labour markets are from Census 2022. Earnings data last refreshed 2026-07-27. Coverage, suppression rules, and what the PAYE base excludes are set out on the methodology page.