Methodology

Taxable income, salary or wage income, and advertised salary

Taxable income is the amount left after deductions allowed on the return. Table 8 and Table 15 publish average and median taxable income for 2023–24.

Salary or wage income is employment income reported to the ATO. Table 15 publishes average and median salary or wage income as a separate measure. This site never presents taxable income as salary or wage income.

Advertised salary is the figure in a job ad. It is not in the ATO tables this site uses, and these pages do not publish job-ad figures.

Self-reported occupations

Occupation on these pages is the occupation people reported on their tax return for the income year.

Some returns have a blank or unstated occupation. Those rows stay in the source tables. This site does not publish a page for a blank or unstated occupation.

Part-year workers

The ATO counts each individual who lodged a return in that occupation or postcode, including people who worked only part of the income year.

The published tables do not split full-year work from part-year work. A median or average from these tables is not a full-year advertised salary for the same job.

Suppressed cells

The ATO withholds some cells. This site stores those values as missing and shows them as “not published”.

A withheld cell is never shown as 0 and is never left blank.

To meet privacy rules the ATO also combines some groups with others or leaves some items out, and its totals may not equal the sum of their parts because of rounding.

The two-year lag

Figures on this site are for the 2023–24 income year. The ATO publishes Taxation Statistics about two years after that income year ends.

These pages are not a live feed of current pay.

How occupations are coded

The ATO’s occupation codes are based on ANZSCO, the Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations. One code can cover more than one job title, and the name on a page may not be the title a person uses for their job.

Codes ending in 99 cover a wide range of occupations that are not classified elsewhere, so their figures describe a mix of jobs. Most of these have “other” or “nec” (not elsewhere classified) in the name.

Comparing years

The ATO revises its occupation codes as ANZSCO is updated. Its notes cite ANZSCO First Edition for 2017–18 and 2018–19, and ANZSCO 2022, 2023 and 2024 for 2021–22, 2022–23 and 2023–24. When a code’s scope changes, the number of people under it can rise or fall sharply from one year to the next, and the figures for those years may not describe the same group of people.

For postcodes, the ATO notes that from 2016–17 onwards its medians and averages include everyone who reported taxable income, including people who reported zero. It does not say this of earlier years, so figures before 2016–17 may not be calculated on the same basis. That includes 2013–14, the first year of the ten-year growth figure on postcode pages.

Who each figure counts

Median and average taxable income and total income include everyone who reported at that label on the return, including people who reported zero. Median and average salary or wage income include only people who reported salary or wage income above zero. For the same occupation the two measures can therefore cover different groups of people.

A postcode appears only when more than 200 returns were lodged there in the year. PO box postcodes have been included since 2017–18, and a PO box postcode counts people whose address on the return is a PO box, not the residents of an area.

The income percentile calculator uses Table 16, which covers taxable individuals only: people who paid tax for 2023–24.

How sex is recorded

The ATO derives sex from several of its own sources. Where a person’s sex is unknown or indeterminate, the ATO counts them as male, so the male figures include everyone whose sex the ATO does not know.

Late returns

The ATO compiled these statistics from returns it had processed by a cut-off date after the income year. Returns processed later are not counted, and the ATO notes that the statistics are not necessarily complete.