This is the normal monthly salary in Norway
Check the overview! Here you can see how many jobs in Norway have the same monthly salary as your job.
FriFagbevegelse has obtained statistics from Statistics Norway showing the distribution of wages in Norway. The salary figures are for 2021.
The statistics are divided into different salary levels and show how many jobs there are with the different salary levels for a full-time position, before tax.
The figures show wages for work in both the public and private sectors – wages for all jobs in Norway that employers report to the authorities.
The lowest salary level is the jobs with NOK 10,000-15,000 in monthly salary. The vast majority of those with such a low monthly salary are apprentices, according to Statistics Norway. The salary differences between apprentices are large. Check here how much apprentices get in salary for 45 years.
The top salary level has worked with – hold on tight – over NOK 185,000 in monthly salary.
What both of these have in common is that there are few with such salaries.
Do you work part-time?
The salary levels in the table are for full positions.
Statistics Norway has recalculated salaries for part-time positions to full-time positions, so that it becomes possible to compare the salary value of all jobs.
For example, if you have a 50 percent position and an agreed salary of NOK 15,500 a month, your salary ends up in the salary level of NOK 30,000-35,000 a month for full-time.
A lot by the way: What is the minimum wage in Norway? Here is the overview
The most common salary
– The normal salary is NOK 40-45,000 a month, says Elin Svarstad, an economist who researches, among other things, wages and wage formation at Fafo, Institute for Labor and Welfare Research.
Slightly more than 16 per cent of the jobs were paid in this way, the figures from Statistics Norway show.
The second largest group is monthly salaries of between NOK 45,000-50,000 a month. 14 percent of the jobs were paid this way.
– This agrees well with what is the median salary in Norway, says Fafo’s Elin Svarstad.
The median salary was just over NOK 45,000 in 2021.
So what is the median salary? When we sort all the salaries from lowest to highest, the median salary is right in the middle. This means that half of the wage earners have lower wages than the median wage and half have higher wages.
Average salary is not common
The Fafo researcher says median salary is a far better measure of regular salary than average salary.
– Average salary is a misleading measure when we talk about regular salary.
As many as 60 percent of us earn less than the average salary, inform wage researchers at Statistics Norway.
The average salary becomes so high because a few with extremely high salaries drag the average up very much.
Elin Svarstad explains:
– Imagine that you and I are sitting in a room. We probably both have a monthly salary of something close to the median, NOK 45,000. Then the Equinor boss enters the room, he earned 18 million last year. Then the average salary for the three of us will be over one and a half million kroner a month, which is not quite a normal salary.
Who is low paid?
The figures show that many people are paid relatively well for their work. But not all.
A common definition of “low wage” in Norway is that the wage is below 85 percent of the average industrial worker’s wage. Last year, 85 per cent of the average industrial worker’s salary was over NOK 37,000 in monthly salary before tax. If you got less than that, you were underpaid.
If we use this definition, around 24 per cent in Norway are low paid.
However, there are several definitions of “low-paid”.
– A low wage level of 85 per cent of the average wage for industrial workers is quite high in an international context, says Elin Svarstad at Fafo.
A common definition in the rest of the world is to define low wages as less than a third of the median wage, she says. In Norway, this means a salary of less than NOK 30,500 a month.
According to this definition, the proportion of low-wage workers is much smaller, around 7 per cent.
Sweden is best at small wage differences
– How does Norway compare to other countries when it comes to differences between high-wage and low-wage workers?
– We are leading the way in the world. Only Sweden has even smaller wage differences than Norway. Denmark has slightly bigger differences than Sweden and Norway, says Fafo’s Elin Svarstad.
At the same time, she points out that both Norway and Sweden have had an increase in wage differences in recent years. It is about the fact that the lowest wages have had the worst wage development, i.e. that the wages of the lowest wages have also increased the least.
– What is the explanation for Norway being behind Sweden?
– Much of this is linked to the degree of trade union organization in working life. Sweden has a much higher collective bargaining agreement than Norway, which means that more wages are paid according to the collective agreement.
Collective bargaining agreement in Sweden is 90 percent. In Norway, it is 64 per cent.
– Compared to, for example, the USA and Great Britain, we have small wage differences, says Svarstad.