Where Irish salary data actually comes from
Before you trust a salary figure — ours or anyone’s — it is worth knowing who measured it, what they measured, and what they did not.
We do not publish salary benchmarks yet
An earlier version of this page showed salary ranges and credited them to the CSO, to Revenue, to employer submissions and to employee reports. It should not have: we held no such data, and we had received nothing from the CSO or from Revenue. Those figures have been removed rather than restated. When role.ie publishes a benchmark it will carry its sample size, its date and its method, and you will be able to check it.
The sources worth using
These are the bodies that genuinely measure Irish pay. Each entry says what it publishes and what it cannot answer — the second half is where most bad salary figures come from.
Central Statistics Office — Earnings and Labour Costs
Publishes: Ireland’s official earnings statistics: average weekly and hourly earnings, published quarterly and annually, broken down by economic sector and by broad occupational group.
Cannot tell you: It is not a per-job-title salary table. There is no CSO figure for "Senior Project Manager in Cork" — the breakdowns are by sector and broad group, and averages inside a sector cover a very wide spread of individual roles.
Go to the sourceCSO — Structure of Earnings Survey
Publishes: A deeper periodic survey covering the distribution of earnings — not just the average — including breakdowns by occupation, age, sex and enterprise size.
Cannot tell you: It runs every few years rather than continuously, so the most recent published year may be some way behind the current market.
Go to the sourceWorkplace Relations Commission
Publishes: The statutory floor: the national minimum wage, and the Employment Regulation Orders and Sectoral Employment Orders that set legally binding minimum rates in particular sectors, such as construction and electrical contracting.
Cannot tell you: These are legal minimums, not market rates. A job paying the sectoral minimum is paying what it must, which tells you nothing about what the role is worth.
Go to the sourcePublic sector pay scales
Publishes: Exact published scales, point by point, for public service roles — the civil service, the HSE, teaching, An Garda Síochána and the rest. For these jobs the number is not an estimate at all.
Cannot tell you: It applies only to public service employment. It says nothing about private sector pay for a comparable role.
Go to the sourceRecruitment agency salary guides
Publishes: Annual guides from the large Irish recruitment firms, generally built from the placements that agency made in the previous year.
Cannot tell you: They describe the roles that agency placed, which is not a random sample of the market, and the firm publishing them has a commercial interest in the numbers. Useful as a cross-check, not as a source of record.
Go to the source
Five questions to ask of any salary figure
Including the ones on this site.
- Average, median, or range?
- An average is dragged upward by a small number of very high earners. A median — the midpoint — is usually the more honest answer to "what does this job pay". If a figure does not say which it is, you cannot use it.
- What is the sample?
- A national average across a whole sector and a figure drawn from forty placements in Dublin are both "data" and they answer different questions. A number with no sample size behind it is an opinion.
- What period is it in?
- Irish pay is quoted annually, hourly, and for contract work as a day rate. €500 a day is not €500 a week and neither is €500,000. Always convert deliberately rather than by eye.
- Base, or total?
- A €50,000 base and a €50,000 on-target package are different offers. Commission, bonus, pension contribution and shares are all real, but they are not base salary and they do not all arrive with the same certainty.
- How old is it?
- A survey published this year usually measures last year. In a moving market that gap matters, and the honest sources say plainly which period they cover.
What role.ie will eventually be able to tell you
Every listing on this board must state a salary. That means the board itself measures something no survey does: what Irish employers are advertising, right now, role by role and county by county. It is a narrower thing than what people earn — an advertised range is an offer, not a payslip — but it is current, it is specific, and we can show you the listings each number was calculated from.
It needs listings before it means anything. When there are enough for a figure to be worth quoting, it will be published here with the number of listings behind it, the period it covers, and a link to them.
See the advertised salaries we do haveJudge a job by what it pays
We’ll email you Irish roles matching what you’re after, with the salary range in the email.
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