The pay gap between Ireland’s top and bottom earners has widened considerably in the last 10 years, according to the Central Statistics Office (CSO).
In an analysis of the earnings distribution here, the CSO noted that the gap in weekly earnings between workers at the bottom of the income distribution and those at the top jumped by nearly a third, from €1,077 to €1,416, between 2016 and 2023.
The findings, which were based on employments active for at least 50 weeks, run counter to other reports which suggest income inequality in Ireland has remained relatively stable since the 2008 financial crash.
The CSO figures showed the bottom 10 per cent of earners in Ireland had median (middle value) weekly earnings of €247.50 last year while the top 10 per cent of earners had weekly earnings of €1,663.72.
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The CSO said the median annual income (of all workers) last year was €43,221 while the mean or average was €53,995.
“As is typical in earnings distributions, a relatively small number of high earners result in a positively skewed earnings distribution of employees in Ireland,” the agency said.
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“In a positively skewed earnings distribution, mean earnings are greater than median earnings as the mean is increased by those higher earners,” it said.
In 2023, median weekly earnings in Ireland stood at €699.28 (half of all jobs earned more than this amount and half earned less), an increase of 4.2 per cent on the corresponding figure for 2022 (€670.90). In comparison, mean weekly earnings stood at €895.51, 4.6 per cent higher than the previous year (€856.21).
Employments in the human health and social work sector accounted for more than half (57.3 per cent) of the employments in the bottom income bracket. Conversely, the industry sector, which includes the State’s large pharma and medtech sectors, contributed the largest proportion of employments to the 90th percentile (15.6 per cent).
The figures showed almost two-thirds (63.2 per cent) of jobs in the accommodation and food services sector had weekly earnings of less than €450, while more than half (53.2 per cent) of the employments in the arts, entertainment, recreation and other services sector had similar weekly earnings.
In contrast, just 5.9 per cent of employments in the information and communication sector had earnings of less than €450 per week, while almost one in five in this sector had weekly earnings of €2,550 or more. IT workers are typically the highest paid earners in the Irish economy.
The report also showed that one in three female employments (32.1 per cent) had weekly earnings of less than €450 in 2023, compared with one in five male employments (19.4 per cent). More than one in 10 employments (12.8 per cent) earned €1,500 or more per week.
The figures also indicated that employments within the private sector accounted for almost four in every five employments (79.1 per cent). But the CSO numbers show that the private sector numbers fall as earnings rise, though they still represent a majority.
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