What jobs actually pay
3,469OCCUPATIONS
What a job pays, taken straight from the statistics office of each country — the American payroll survey, the British PAYE sample, Canada's wage file, Australia's tax returns, Singapore's wage survey, New Zealand's household survey and the ILO's global series. Every figure is free to look at, and every page says how it was measured.
SOURCE·National statistics agencies (7 countries)·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Pick a country
The argument this site is built on
Most salary sites cover one country, so they never have to face the awkward part: a wage converted at the exchange rate is not what that wage is worth. Convert an Indian salary and it looks small. Spend it in India and it is not. Every comparison page here prints both readings and draws the distance between them, because that distance is the answer.
At the exchange rate At local prices The disagreement
Registered nurse, in the 5 countries that publish a comparable figure. Hollow marker: what the wage converts to at the exchange rate. Solid marker: what it buys at home. The hatched span is how far those two answers are apart.
Read this comparison in full →
- Registered nurse 5 countries
- Software developer 5 countries
- Electrician 5 countries
- Accountant 5 countries
- Secondary school teacher 4 countries
- Primary school teacher 4 countries
- Doctor / general practitioner 5 countries
- Civil engineer 4 countries
- Mechanical engineer 4 countries
- Electrical engineer 4 countries
- Plumber 5 countries
- Carpenter 5 countries
- Chef 5 countries
- Truck driver 5 countries
- Pharmacist 5 countries
- Dentist 3 countries
- Lawyer / solicitor 4 countries
- Police officer 3 countries
- Architect 5 countries
- Graphic designer 4 countries
- Data scientist 5 countries
- Marketing manager 4 countries
- Human resources manager 3 countries
- Financial analyst 5 countries
- Welder 5 countries
- Hairdresser 5 countries
- Bus driver 5 countries
- Security guard 4 countries
- Receptionist 4 countries
- Cleaner 3 countries
- Chemical engineer 4 countries
- Air traffic controller 3 countries
- Airline pilot 4 countries
- Psychologist 5 countries
- Physiotherapist 5 countries
- Veterinarian 4 countries
- Social worker 5 countries
- Cyber security analyst 3 countries
What this site does to a government wage table
- Seven national releases are read in their own currencies and their own reference periods; nothing is rebased or harmonised on the way in.
- The published distribution is carried whole where it exists — percentiles, not just an average — because the spread is most of what a reader is actually asking about.
- Every wage is read twice: at the European Central Bank reference rate, and at the World Bank purchasing-power conversion factor for that country.
- Cross-country matches are curated by hand. A country joins a comparison only when its own classification contains a genuinely equivalent occupation.
- Countries measure pay differently, and this site says so on every page rather than burying it. That disclaimer is not boilerplate; it is the main methodological fact about the data.
converted = local wage / FX(local -> USD) adjusted = local wage / PPP(country)
What people ask next
- Which countries does PayLens cover?
- Seven: the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand and India. Each one is a separate national statistics release, not a single harmonised file.
- Why does the same salary show two different US-dollar figures?
- Because there are two honest answers. One converts the wage at the exchange rate — what you could wire abroad. The other adjusts it for the country's own price level — what it buys where it was earned. For India those two differ by roughly a factor of four.
- Is any of this self-reported?
- No. Every figure is a published government or ILO statistic, used as released, with the agency and reference period printed under it.
Why this exists
Seven governments run enormous, careful wage surveys and publish the results for nothing. The salary sites that rank for these questions mostly ignore them, because self-reported numbers are cheaper to collect and an email wall converts better. This site is the government data, read properly, with the measurement stated plainly and the distribution shown rather than flattened into a single average.
